Conan Chop Chop is an upcoming action-adventure roguelike video game set in Conan the Barbarian world, developed by Mighty Kingdom and published by Funcom.
The game was originally due for release in September 2019 but was delayed twice and given a new, slightly more obscure release date of “early 2021” on PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam. Both delays were due to the developers wanting to add more functionality to the game. The first instance was to add multiplayer, while the second was to implement more random traps, bosses, and events to keep the game fresh and dynamic.
Another reason for the delay was that there wasn’t any undue pressure placed on the game designers and programming team. “If we had launched this year, there’d be half the number of cute pigs in the game. And you can’t launch a Conan game without that. And besides, the only crunch we want in our Conan game is the crunch of bones beneath our sandalled feet,” explained Funcom chief creative officer Joel Bylos.
Despite first being created all the way back in 1932, Conan the Barbarian remains an essential and popular character in modern-day pop culture, a fact that this game’s publisher Funcom has taken advantage of. Besides Conan Chop Chop, they have released two other video games themed on the character, including the widely popular open-world survival title Conan Exiles published in 2017 and the 2019 real-time strategy game Conan Unconquered.
There is also an upcoming television series set to debut on Netflix based on the world’s most famous barbarian, to go along with the animated series Conan the Adventurer from 1993. There have been three full-length feature films about Conan, and there is even a branded slot game titled Conan that can be found on many New Jersey online casinos such as Virgin and 888casino.
The barbarian’s global appeal is without question, but it does add pressure on the developers’ shoulders to deliver a good game. Conan Chop Chop has a strong focus on dungeon crawling through procedurally generated levels as a roguelike title, so no two levels will be alike. In fact, you would have to play the game quite a lot to have any chance of seeing a duplicate level with a reported 9 billion different randomly-generated dungeons to explore.
The number of items in the game to find and collect has grown from 14 trillion to a number that “is now too high for the human brain to fathom”, according to publisher Funcom, who is on the verge of being acquired by Tencent. Of course, no one expects anyone to get anywhere close to collecting all of them, but a number that high will mean there will be a lot of replayability to this title. Not only that, but the wide range of items available will also mean players will likely be able to create a unique look for their character to show off in multiplayer games.
The game is set in the famous world of Conan the Barbarian, but things have gone awry. A dark magician named Thoth-Amon is planning to resurrect the ancient evil wizard Xaltotun to bring chaos and destruction to the world. Without the player’s help, the world is sure to be plunged into darkness and evil.
Unlike the other two Conan games, the graphics for Chop Chop are expected to be a bit more simplified, with a cast of mainly stick figures filling out the world, so you probably won’t need a state of the art graphics card to play it. However, the Conan story’s reputation and legacy are marauding barbarians and evil wizards, so expect this title to be just as bloody and violent as any other Conan game, despite the art style.
