Conan - blood soaked first look

The result is an arsenal of more than 100 balletically graceful slashes, chops, blocks, grapples, throws and finishing kills, with the weapons Conan is holding in each hand determining which moves he can do at any given time. Conan can also throw a weapon if he's holding two, pick up most any implement an enemy drops, and sometimes grab a particularly nice killing tool right out of its owner's hands.

This being a next-gen game, it all looks top shelf, whether Conan was heaving boulders into a log platform to bring down archers in a scrubby outpost or stamping through a jungle hacking pirates into small fountains of arterial spray and dismembered appendages.

Once the pirates' captives were freed, we set sail for the demo's biggest splash: a shipboard boss battle against a marvelously slimy-looking giant squid. As Conan chopped on its tentacles, it would spit ink, grab sailors and turn them into tar-coated zombies, and sometimes grab onto the main mast and tilt the entire ship toward the watery depths and its pointy-beak-like maw. Given the scope and style of the game, comparisons to God of War are inevitable. But Conan has enough history to carve out its own place in gaming's machismo museum if the finished product plays as well as it looks to.