Conan Exiles

Conan Exiles has quietly built one of survival gaming's most devoted communities since 2018, and the review corpus makes that plain in an unusual way — players logging eleven thousand hours, players in their sixties describing it as a relaxing solo pastime, players who've watched the game through years of Early Access and beyond and are still checking in. That's the foundation this review has to weigh against a real, current tension over what the game has become commercially since.

A survival sandbox that commits fully to its source

The core loop is familiar survival-genre territory — gather, craft, build, fight — executed with unusual detail and a willingness to lean fully into Robert E. Howard's mature, brutal Hyboria rather than softening it for a broader audience. Building systems let players construct anything from a modest camp to genuinely sprawling fortresses, and taming thralls to work, fight and defend alongside you gives the base-building half of the game real stakes beyond decoration. It's the kind of depth that explains why so many reviewers describe playtimes most games never approach.

What changed after the Tencent acquisition

The complaint that recurs most consistently in recent years traces back to Funcom's acquisition by Tencent. A significant share of long-time players describe the years since as bringing changes to the business model they didn't sign up for when they bought the game: a battle pass and a cosmetic "Bazaar" storefront layered onto a game that was originally sold as a straightforward premium purchase, plus a requirement to stay connected to Funcom's servers even when playing entirely solo. None of these additions are described as pay-to-win in the reviews — the complaint is about direction and trust rather than competitive fairness — but it's a real, sustained source of frustration from exactly the players who've invested the most in the game.

Bugs that have outlasted several years of patches

A separate, more concrete complaint is technical: returning players, some checking back in after long breaks as recently as the past year, report the same specific issues persisting — building pieces and NPC thralls behaving unreliably, among other long-standing rough edges. That's a fair thing to know going in: this is a game whose core systems are excellent, but whose polish hasn't fully caught up with its age.

Official servers versus everywhere else

A third, structural thread concerns official multiplayer specifically. Reviewers frequently describe official servers as overcrowded with unmanaged building sprawl and vulnerable to griefing, and the most common advice running through the community is to play on private or modded servers instead, where the experience is reported as considerably better managed. The game's active modding scene gives players real ability to opt out of official play's worst tendencies, which is worth knowing if the official-server complaints would otherwise put you off.

Final verdict

Conan Exiles remains a genuinely excellent survival-building sandbox, detailed and brutal in exactly the ways its source material demands, and the devotion of its long-term community is real and well-earned. It settles at 6.5 rather than higher because the business-model shift since the Tencent acquisition — a battle pass, a cash shop, an always-online requirement for single-player — represents a real change many original buyers didn't ask for, layered on top of bugs that have had years to be fixed and still show up in recent reports. Play it for the building and survival systems, favour private servers over official ones, and go in aware of how the game's commercial direction has shifted since you might remember it.

Price and review data checked 5 August 2026.

If you'd rather your progression came without a battle pass or a cash shop attached, Wanderer keeps its entire experience free of both.