Conan Unconquered copies They Are Billions and unsurprisingly it's fun

Conan Unconquered is a lot like They Are Billions. It's not just the 'build a base and defend it against increasingly daunting waves of enemies' survival idea: it's the bones of the game, the mechanics. It's in the way your resources work and how you harvest them. It's in the way you lay out your base and build your defences. It's in the way waves of enemies are announced and how they approach. To be blunt, it's a bit of a rip-off.

But then, why not? They Are Billions works brilliantly. The race to establish a base and wall it off before an enormous conga line of enemies smashes into it from all fronts is thrilling. Why not steal a bit of that? Funcom and developer Petroglyph don't seem particularly shy about it. They saw a chance for a quick turnaround - about a year, I'm told - and took it. And you know what? It works. Not quite as well, but it works.

The nuts and bolts, as I mentioned, are the same. You juggle a need to keep everything within your walls with a need to branch out to exploit more food/wood/stone/etc. The enemy waves are weak to begin with, easy to swat away, but by the end you need defences everywhere. Mix in a fire raging through your base, or disease, and you'll begin to panic. How to manage it all? Tick tock, tick tock - another wave approaching.

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