Played with keyboard/mouse and with 3 other players, very fun game, it's responsive and there's room for creativity in the way you build your character for your run. If you manage to get a weapon and charm that have synergy then you can do much more damage and get more buffs for your character. The enemies all have a prompt that shows you when they are attacking and once you learn their patterns, you will have a good time.

I personally think the default controls are pretty good but it would still be nice if there was button mapping available (they might add it in later?)

It's a bit hard to tell what are enemies and what are your allies in co-op, especially when there's pets involved as well, so i think an option to make your allies all one colour (e.g blue) and your enemies all one colour (e.g red) would be beneficial.

This game has potential. A lot of potential, in fact. Unfortunately the game is absolutely littered with bugs and in not even 45 minutes of gameplay, I've experienced 2 softlocks and had a menu icon stuck on my screen (requiring a restart to fix).

And from what I've been reading, this game hasn't had a meaningful update in a very long time. It's a shame. If the developers fix the game, it's absolutely worth picking up. But in its current state, your money is better spent elsewhere.

When you play coop (the whole point of this game), progression is only saved for the hosting player.

Boring, repetitive and not a very exciting roguelike. It is also riddled with bugs. I regret having spent 10h on this game, as I was giving it the benefit of the doubt for too long.

More damning: this game does not offer key remapping. Absolutely inexcusable for a PC game. I don't care about your "better experienced with a controller"; let me play how I want! Not to mention it's not very welcoming to people with accessibility issues.

As many others pointed out, you cannot get past the first boss due to a bug. Even worse: it seems to be present since 6 months (march) and nothing done. Clear sign of a rip off...
Was fun until then though...

Conan Chop Chop is a mixed bag that will give back plenty if you put a few hours into it, but the quality of what it gives largely depends on what you want from it to begin with.

Room to room based combat and meta progression are a genre staple at this point, and the core gameplay of this one in particular is fun, but not without a few problems. First and foremost there is no option to rebind keys. I personally had an issue that only happened in online co-op (more on that later) where the game decided I was using a controller while I had none plugged in. This lead to me not having a cursor on the screen, making aiming with my sword and/or bow interesting to say the least. Speaking of the bow, it is naturally bound to left CTRL. Oof for some.

There are two currency based progressions in the game. One is your character's skill points. Each character has multiple skills to unlock that range from basic +max health starts to unique traits. The other form is unlocking items such as weapons, armors, shields and charms (perks such as having a pig or chicken follow you around, or coating your weapon with fire, etc.)

So here's the thing about co-op. I couldn't find a single game online, and the community created Discord is more dead than not. Luckily a friend snagged this game, so we played it to completion together. Inviting people is simple, as is connecting. Remember the meta progression? Well, if you are a visitor, you can't unlock weapons, charms, etc. This was done on purpose. This is fine though, because the currency will carry over if you fire the game up in single player.

The bigger issue is that sometimes enemies die, but.... they don't. Only one player can see them. The issue is that the rooms lock until they are cleared and if there is an enemy that has no health bar and can't hurt you and you can't hurt it, well, that's a soft lock. The first few times we thought it was funny, but the further in we got and the more it happened, we got annoyed. I have many theories as to what causes the bug, and mind you it didn't happen SUPER often, but that is a huge buzz kill, especially later in the game when we built our characters and had decent items.

Despite all this, I got my money's worth. I had more fun than not parrying slimes, understanding boss patterns and making builds. Personally, this one gets a yes from me because I had fun and I got decent play time out of this. I mentioned all of the big things that could potentially put people off to make this as informative as possible.

I looked for a fun game to play with a buddy, and that's what I got back.

This game needs a few patches. It's great fun, but there are tons of frustrating bugs on release which ruin the experience. I've had to restart my game from desktop half a dozen times in my first 80 minutes of play. I want to recommend this to my friends to play co-op, but I cant do it when the game is in this state.

Finished the tutorial and entered the first area. Was greeted by a popup warning me to move to a specific area and to press F to continue... pressing F did nothing... and clicking the button did nothing. I tried clearing a few areas with a giant box on my screen and eventually uninstalled and left this review. Not impressed :(

The game clearly has potential and the classes and weapons I tried were very fun to use. Overworld movement is too slow, even with the dash abilities.

Unfortunately, I've encountered several game breaking bugs in roughly 1.5 hours of playtime. Reading through the community discussions, it seems there is a lack of communication from the developers. On top of that there is a large list of fixes already and the game is still very buggy. I'd say wait and come back to it after you've checked if there are improvements. All in all I have to rate this negatively, despite the potential and really liking the gameplay so far.

Alright, I admit this review is kind of biased, because at the moment of writing I and my wife have played this game for only 5 hours in local coop. But aw man, what can I say, seriously, how this game handles progression is kind of unnerving. To get things straight, yeah, I get it, Conan Chop Chop obviously is meant to be more in a traditional Roguelike spirit (sorry for my non-purist view, but it just didn’t feel very Roguelite to me like the game description states). My biggest gripe, even if you beat any or several area bosses, in the next run you STILL have to start all over again if you die. But in my opinion actually this concept completely ruins the overall fun. Really, the game would have been SO much better if you could start in the next area after beating a boss, like so many other famous Roguelikes and -lites do (e.g. Children of Morta, Crypt of the Necrodancer etc.). But I guess they didn’t implement that because the game only features 4 areas, and then you’d probably rush through it too quickly (and the content is lacking). Anyway, the leveling system (to alleviate some minor aspects) sucks as well in local coop. You see, you only get the same XP as in single player after a run, but you have to pay for 2-4 players to level up, which of course is super arduous all in all (multiple the grind so to speak). Sigh, everything just costs so much, while you get so little experience in the first levels, which means either you get lucky by getting the perfect items in a run to reach higher areas and get more XP, or if not (because chests/keys, hearts dropped and items sold are extremely unbalanced), repeating and repeating the first levels over and over again. Tedious, boring and grindy over time, especially if you keep in mind that you have to level up all 4 characters for all achievements. Add to this that weapons, charms, armor etc. also always start at early tiers in the hub shops (good advice, don’t buy too much, you’ll get better gear in the chests afterwards soon), and also with few varieties, because the other currency needed for better unlocks is super scarce in the first levels as well. Seriously, everything is just so horribly und unnecessarily time-consuming, this just drags everything down in my opinion.

Long story short, under the line Conan Chop Chop definitely could be really promising, but the state it’s in, I don’t know. Some other reviews say it’s supposedly based on 4 players, which would explain why the bosses are so darn hard (you simultaneously always have to fight off a wildly moving boss and other quick, re-spawning, area-damaging enemies, way easier with several partners). But for me, urg, my experience is just a negative one at the moment. Sure, I might get back to it once in a while, just to see how much we’re able to progress, but it’s definitely not my favorite pastime right now. And I seriously wouldn’t pay full price for it (got it in Humble Choice, so at least that’s nothing I can complain about).

Edit: Meanwhile we played it a whole lot longer, and guess what, we found out that you can practically save everywhere (even inside the dungeons). Just quit a game when you got a good load-out and managed some levels/rooms well, backup your file, and if you fail after that, just exchange those files and use ‘Continue’ (if you’re wondering, the save is in AppData-LocaLow-Funcom_Oslo_AS). At least then the game definitely is slightly more fun, and you can easily test out new attacks/rhythms of bosses in the later levels. Keeps your mind saner ;) But I still hate the area 4 boss, and the fact that in some levels the map just scrolls too slowly so that enemies shoot you from outside the screen is stupid. Nevertheless, my first-impression negative rating still stands, because all those workarounds shouldn’t be necessary in the first place. And even then you’ll probably need a lot of super grindy re-runs to achieve all achievements and upgrades, not speaking about the balancing issues all over the place regarding the player number and item spawning. In my opinion especially the levelling system needs a SERIOUS makeover, because meanwhile we also noticed that the higher you max out your overall profile level, the less experience you get in future runs for the skill points, which means the 3rd to 4th character got horrific costs (just for an example, in early runs you get 14 skill points when you reach boss 4, but in the next run only 7, next 5, and later obviously like someone reported only 1). And like I said, in local coop (where 2 players are mandatory after all) this equals to hell incarnate. Urggh, I don’t know, this game is just so unpolished and got so many issues (the damage telegraphing that other reviews speak of also annoys me a lot actually, you never know what really hit you). Seriously, everything considered, under the line this game just feels like a kind of hate-love-relationship which is bad for you in the end. I mean, as good as the game looks and feels at first glance, and even if you just love the Conan trope, but who in the world would replay a game like this (with only 4 levels) hundreds of times, just to unlock everything, when there are lots of fair, modern and clever scripted Roguelites with extremely high replayability value and lots of variation?