By Crom! By Mitra! By Set!

Age of Conan is similar enough to its MMO predecessors and different enough to bring a fresh new perspective on things. The brutal fantasy world of Hyboria seemed like the right choice for the Anarchy Online's developer Funcom, moving them away from the sci-fi universe; although so many Warcraft MMO clones are based on that. I guess what I'm trying to say is I would love to see games past over everything fantasy these days.

Conan features breathtaking graphics, and you'll sometimes just relax while staring at the beautiful environment. Although advanced DirectX 10 support was promised, the game doesn't use it yet: DirectX 10 graphics will be introduced later this year at Leipzig's Game Convention. I am not saying however every place is unique and looks fantastic, as a MMO has to be really vast and most of the times resources are reused.

Game sounds are immersive, and give you the feeling you are actually in Hyboria. There are four settings of sound quality in the main menu, along with some optimizations for various sound cards. Yes, Conan supports accelerated sound, and basic to more "exotic" speaker configurations like 7.1. It's not just the support for latest technologies, but the effects and voices as well. On the character creation screen you can even customize your player's voice, picking one out of the four available presets. Weapons clashes, spells, monsters, chopping your enemies here and there, slashing and cutting your way around, not to mention your surrounding environment, are just the way you pictured them to be.

It's impressive that voice acting was added to the game, to every NPC character up till ~level 20. That's your starting area, the island of Tortage, which is a nice way to get you into the big online world.

Likewise, the beautiful and lush jungles and the vast harbor amazes you every step of the way if you can afford to play the game on high. Even if you have a lower system, I really encourage you to set everything to max just once, and take a look.

Things however go a bit down from here, because once you pass the starting area you will be disappointed to find out many quest givers just lost their voice in the process. Graphics are still good, but they are thought at a larger scale: not many more variations. If it's desert, then it's a desert all around. Plus I really don't like mosquito sounds! Makes me paranoid. And if you go to the more populated zones like Aquilonia, you will find the house design ok, but a little too alike. Oh, and be prepared for your FPS to drop! I don't know exactly what you can do, because everything I tried seemed pointless once I entered this area, which seems to be the nexus of Hyboria. The only good advice I can give you is to lower environmental occlusion setting, from high to low, or none. That helps... a bit.

Back to the audio part of this game, the music is absolutely incredible. It is worth to buy the Collector's Edition of the game just to get the music CD along! Medieval inspired songs from various cultures can be heard in different areas of Hyboria, without anything being to specific. You can say from time to time: "hmm... this sounds a bit Irish", or "this is similar to Braveheart soundtrack", or "this song is like something in Lord of the Rings".