Magic powers complement Conan's arsenal, including the abilities to turn enemies into stone and conjure firestorms.

Critics enjoyed Conan's combat system and gory kills, but said the game failed to match the experience offered in God of War.

Players control Conan the Barbarian from a third-person perspective while attempting to advance through the series of levels that subdivide the game.

When Conan lands a sequence of successive hits on his enemies, he activates his Song of Death, which increases the damage of his attacks for a short time.

Gaining these powers in later stages of the game, the barbarian can turn opponents into stone, call down fire from the heavens, and summon flocks of ravens to do his bidding.

Conan's developer, Nihilistic Software, chose several Hyborian locations, such as Kush, Stygia, and the Barachan Isles, to establish a link to the literary world.

Stygia was illustrated as a land filled with structures resembling Egyptian tombs and the Barachan Isles as lushly jungled islands.

[7] Conan is the protagonist in many of Howard's stories: a franchise has been built around the character, and Frank Frazetta's paintings have further elevated the barbarian's profile in pop culture.

[3][8] Howard presented his barbarian hero as a strong, shrewd, barbaric, and ambitious man in a primitive world of magic.

[9] Nihilistic originally intended to stay faithful to the literature,[10] but the writers strayed from the canon by showing the barbarian as willing to use magic.

[2][3] To garner extra publicity, the publisher THQ hired Golden Globe-winning actor Ron Perlman to provide the voice for Conan.

Told as a campfire story, cut scenes—in the form of static artwork or animation rendered by the game engine—open and close each level with narratives from an elderly A'kanna.

Teaming up with the barbarian to find his armor, the warrior queen hopes to use its magic to end the curse—the Black Death—that is causing her people to kill each other.

Flashbacks are shown when retrieving a piece of armor after killing certain bosses; these back-stories tell of Graven's imprisonment of the gods,[19] his plan to sacrifice his daughter A'kanna,[20] and his creation of the Black Death to transform the world to his liking.

[22] In 2005, THQ acquired the rights to produce a series of video games featuring Conan the Barbarian and the world of Hyboria.

The team wanted to emulate the complexity of Ninja Gaiden's combat system, with many attacking options and an equal emphasis on being alert to the actions of enemies.

Although the architectures of the two consoles were very different, Nihilistic designed its product to perform equally on both of them, using force feedback and motion sensing to enhance the playing experience.

[2] Conan was originally scheduled for an early 2008 release, but was brought forward to the second half of 2007 because of THQ's poor performance in that fiscal year.

The artists used video graphics technology such as normal mapping technique to emulate brush strokes on the models' textures.

[3][12][16] The character models were outlined with light colors instead of dark ones, creating the subtle blend of object and background found in oil paintings, and fog effects allowed the team to recreate Frazetta's use of shadows in the middle area of the image.

To begin, he wanted to compose simple but powerful melodies, and looked to Basil Poledouris's score for the 1982 film Conan the Barbarian for inspiration.

As Reagan played development copies of the game, he was influenced by two other works: Igor Stravinsky's barbaric and sensual ballet music The Rite of Spring,[30][31] and Bernard Hermann's score from the 1958 action film The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

Reagan also studied with noted percussion artists Denny Seiwell, Emil Richards, and Michael Duffy to gain further insight on the use of drums to accompany the game's bloody and violent plot.

[58] Critics had mixed opinions about three prominent features of the game: voice acting, artwork, and faithfulness to Howard's writings.

Perlman earned acclaim for his vocal performance and gravely voice that matched the game's dialogue,[38][59] but he also received criticism for not sounding like a barbarian.

[4] A few applauded Nihilistic for capturing the oil painting feel of Frazetta's art,[38][60] but several others said the graphics consisted of drab-looking environments that were jagged-edged and pixelated when zoomed in.

[1][39] Despite the average reviews and success of Howard's franchise,[63][64] Conan sold poorly and failed to recoup THQ's investment.