Age of Conan free trial review: as fun as reading a dictionary but way more annoying

Some of my guildies brought up Age of Conan (AOC) as a game to try to keep us busy temporarily. I looked it up, and was curious about its complex combat system and its M for Mature rating. Fatalities! Blood and gore! I really wanted a game that rewarded me with some blood as I hacked and slashed. I'm not a kid anymore and I feel entitled to play a game that has more than the flashing lights and rainbows that all the MMORPGs have for animations these days. Besides, AOC's expansion was getting released so it seemed like a good time to try it (already out for some time, bug fixes, new content, etc).

I decided against buying a copy of the game and downloaded the free trial instead. I FRAPSed my adventures through level 7 and annotated them with my comments:



I am glad I did not pay any money for that garbage. There was not a strain of fun content to lead me along from lvl 1. The game's combat plays horribly and the interfaces are clunky. I simply could not get past level 7. I was confused that the game could be so shitty, so I went to my guild forums to ask for the opinions of some people who played it more:

I'm having trouble getting started... I'm level 6 now and I've been using the same 2 abilities for hours. PVE is making me cry and nothing seems to happen when I queue for that scenario thing on the top left. I keep looking at my XP bar every half an hour and it barely seems to move. When does this game get fun?

Also, the positional/directional melee combat thing seemed like a neat idea at first at first but now it just seems clunky and a waste of 3 hotbar slots. Especially with the double tap evasion bullshit. You have to start evading 3 seconds before your enemy actually does anything for it to work, which makes me feel as nimble as a hippo. Sometimes I double tap and nothing happens! Then there's the stupid shields. That feels so clunky too.

I received some helpful replies, but none reignited any desire to play. They confirmed what I thought, and that it was the game and not just me. I'm pasting some of their comments here for objectivity:

The double taps aren't really to evade individual attacks. They are more to quickly change position if you are getting surrounded. I used them all the time on my guardian to keep enemies in front of my shield, but you are right they are not very effective at dodging attacks. They do give you short buffs though after you do them. If I remember correctly going left or right gives you a small evasion buff, going backwards gives a defensive buff, and going forwards gives a damage buff.

I always found the directional attacks to be fun. At least up until high levels where the chains were 4 and 5 moves long, but I hear they have fixed that.

The shield system is just plain dumb, it was simply a failure. Most people just ignored it. The only time I could see it be useful is in PvE when a boss mob telegraphs some nasty attack. My suggestion is don't worry about it.

and:

To me it was cool at first, then I found out why Q and E weren't strafe by default and it was because apparently they were also 2 more wasted hotkeys. I must admit I never got high enough for it to matter but uh, well i was like WTF am I going to do I already have like 700 keybindings I'm used to and work fine in any other mmo.

That and wtf was with a Hard Coded auto run button??? no matter what I did I had to turn mouse 4 and 5 into god damn random keystrokes so I could use them again.did they change any of that stuff?

As for Tortage (the starting city) it took me like... 10 hours to get out of there? I was going rather inefficiently for awhile but I was still kind of pissed it took me 10 hours especially since I had Skrigg basically hand guiding me for a large portion of it.

This is another one of those promising games that reeks of mismanagement to me. I can see some ideas that have glimpses of brilliance, but the implementation/execution is a 5-star failure.