A few of the GateCrashers got together to check out the new Conan Chop Chop as a team! Mike Ciaccia, Jake McMahon, and Dan McMahon hack and slash their way to a review of the game, what they liked or didn’t like, and recommend who may love this game!
Chach
In Conan Chop Chop, you can play as 1 of 4 characters from the Conan series. Each has different attributes and skill trees. You have the option to play local or online, so you can play with friends or try to take on the adventure alone if you think you are brave enough. Conan and his friends are tasked with helping someone with sinister intentions with the promise of whatever their hearts desire to complete his challenge. You must go through four areas with four different bosses to take on the final challenge. After you choose your warrior, you are given a couple of coins and have the option to update your starting equipment, including weapons, armor, shield, and abilities.
The game is structured as a hack and slash/dungeon crawl with major roguelike elements. Once you enter the first area, you will start to fight a plethora of enemies with both close and ranged attacks. You have one life but many hearts (kind of like Legend of Zelda); the better the armor you wear, the more hearts you can get. You have many things to use for primary weapons (sword, hammer, spear), bows/bombs, and abilities. You also have to block and parry with your shield. When you defeat an enemy, they will drop coins, gems and if you are lucky, a key will drop. The coins will allow you to upgrade your equipment at random vendors, the gems unlock equipment back in town, and the keys open locked chests scattered around the area, which have equipment and abilities in them.
Once you go through the maze of areas and enemies, you will eventually get to the boss room. Once there, you will have to take down the boss while fighting off other enemies. When you defeat them, you get gold, more health, and get ported back to the village. You can also use your coins and gems to upgrade yourself again and move to the next area.
If you happen to die at any part of the game, you will have to start over. The game will tally all your kills and damage. It will give you exp, which will level your account up, giving you skill points so that you can enhance your character. Playing the game by myself was fun but would be better if I had people with me. The game has some difficulty to it. I would rate it a 3 out of 5 for difficulty.
What I like about the game is the fact that I can just sign in and jump into a game, I could stop playing for days, and I come back, and it still is the same. There are so many mixes and match weapons and abilities that every time I play, I can have a different experience. For me, there is not much to not like about the game, but if I had to pick something, it is the fact that once you run out of hearts, that game is over with no chance or penalty to continue the fight. Even though I want to break my controller every time I die, I still will hit reset and try all over again.
Jake
What I liked about this was the animation and art styles of the game. It’s such a fun and refreshing style for what has been on the market recently. The animation of the first boss fight was clean and made it easy to see what his attack pattern was. The co-op aspect is a huge plus for me. It’s also great that you respawn if at least one party member survives the battle.
What I did not like was just that there were just too many enemies popping up during boss fights. Made it way too annoying to just get to and attack the stunned bosses, who have pretty big health bars, to begin with. I also don’t think this is a game I would play by myself.
I think the people who would like this are people just looking for a pretty decent game night activity that doesn’t require too much effort or commitment. If you like things like Castle Crashers or really any game like it, it’s probably worth a shot to play with your friends.
Dan
Chach and Jake have covered many of my thoughts on this game above. When I saw this game was multiplayer, I knew I wanted to check it out. We all play games as a group, so anytime we find a co-op experience, we jump on it. When I saw the game’s very goofy style, I knew I had to play it. From what we played, the gameplay is very smooth with your typical hack and slash elements. The abilities are like perks to your character in that they boost the experience. At one point, I had a chicken in battle armor, and Chach had rainbow slime who fought alongside us. It was a blast for some time with diverse foes that kept each area fresh and interesting.
I was really enjoying the experience until I realized it was a roguelike. It was a shortcoming on my end that I didn’t realize the game was one, so I cannot hold it against it for me not reading that. I cannot stand dying and starting from the beginning. I went in expecting a fun hack and slash to play with my friends like I grew up with, but this was not that. The element of having to start from the beginning if everyone dies made me want to wing my controller through my tv. The setup of the game didn’t feel right being a roguelike to me. It just didn’t make me want to start again in the slightest. Losing my progress didn’t feel like I learned anything with a boss fight with too many enemies to ever actually appreciate the boss fight. I’ve recently found appreciation for these styles of games with Bloodborne and Sifu, but this game didn’t have the unique elements of those that made me go “time to get back on the horse.” There were also multiple times with weird slowdowns mid-game if we got achievements that brought the game to a crawl. Jake and I both experienced these on the PS5, which is unusual for a game like this. Another big element that made the roguelike experience worse was that when you die, only the host can upgrade their character. It makes playing with friends actually a worse experience for them which seems to be the opposite of what you want when looking to have fun.
I do think if you’re into roguelikes and you have friends who are also into punishment, I won’t yuck your yum. You may really love this game if you want to have that experience together. I think there is enough here to have a really good time! That good time just wasn’t a good time for me. I wouldn’t recommend this to a friend who is just looking to get a group together to fight some monsters. It takes a lot more patience than I expected, and the overall game wasn’t for me.