Conan Exiles Enhanced

The easiest trap in reviewing Conan Exiles is to read only that 68 from launch.

You are not reviewing the 2018 game

That 68 belongs to the rough, half-finished 2018 build, its optimisation and bugs never ironed out. What you open today is a game with eight years of added content, a full Unreal Engine 5 visual rebuild and several times the volume — very nearly a different product. The roughly 78 percent positive across more than seventy-eight thousand Steam reviews records the stickiness of that grown-up version, and the gap between it and the launch aggregate is the truest portrait of the work: it turns away the first ten hours and hooks the next hundred.

It is also a milestone on Funcom's résumé. It broke the studio's own 1.4-million-unit record set by Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, becoming Funcom's fastest- and best-selling title, with SteamSpy estimating five to ten million owners. A game the press tagged "below par" selling like that and living this long says it struck something a launch score cannot measure — the long satisfaction of claiming a wasteland and then holding it, a feeling you simply cannot grade from a handful of opening hours.

Who should buy it, and who absolutely should not

The audience filter here is unusually sharp, with almost no middle ground. Buy it if you are willing to pour patience into hundreds of hours of base-building and clan war, and if you treat the survival sandbox itself as a long-term hobby — the reward is the whole arc from nothing to walling off your own kingdom, not some ending. Those players will spend a whole winter out here and count it well spent. If you have a few friends willing to share a server, add another tier to the verdict: clan life with company is this game at its best.

Do not touch it if you want fluid combat, a story with a beginning and an end, a run you can finish in a few hours, and you despise early grinding most of all. For you, the steep learning curve, the wooden combos and that wall of gathering will bounce you inside the first ten hours, and GameSpot's 3 out of 10 is the pain cried out on your behalf in advance.

As for the thing it does that nobody can copy, it still holds in 2026: knock a person out, drag them home, break them into a thrall on the Wheel of Pain, then wall them in with load-bearing stone. That loop of enslavement and conquest, paired with building that obeys physics, is a savagery its most direct rival ARK cannot offer. ARK has dinosaurs to tame and ground to explore, but its building carries no structural simulation and none of Conan's thrill of owning a living person outright.

There is a cleaner way to put the verdict. Conan Exiles is not a great game by the metric most reviews reach for — pacing, polish, a satisfying core loop you can feel in the first session. It is a great place. Its value is not in being played to a finish but in being lived in, returned to, fought over across seasons. The 68 measured the first; the 78 percent measures the second. Eight years on, this wasteland is still the place only the patient get into — and rarely leave once they are in.