Conan - blood soaked first look

"Ahnuld" Schwarzenegger is not Conan the Barbarian. Never has been. His fighting isn't as brutal or dirty as the real Conan's. He doesn't chug as much alcohol as much as the real Conan. And with all respect to Mrs Schwarzenegger, Maria Shriver, we're quite sure the Governator doesn't spend as much time banging the bed's headboard into the wall as would the real Conan.

No, the real Conan the Barbarian is the Cimmerian meat sculptor from Robert E Howard's novels. He's the most hard-drinking, wench-laying, enemy beheading savage in history. And he's out to prove it in THQ's newly-revealed action game, simply titled Conan. Don't confuse this with the MMO Age of Conan - this is a totally separate game, from another publisher, a different developer, and with enough bloodlust for any three other games.

Naturally, much of the game is about combat - gloriously gory, bathed-in-blood combat. Conan typically wields a sword, but we saw him carve limbs and heads from torsos using two swords, an axe, a polearm, a shield and torch, a huge, two-handed bastard sword... you get the idea, right? Basically anything that can be shoved into another man or beast's body and twisted to induce injury is fair game.