An article about the review of Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures  was released on the website Worthplaying.

The details are as below:

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is an Online Action RPG, mixing a deep, story-driven single-player experience and a massive and brutal multiplayer end-game brings forth the ultimate representation of the Age of Conan.

Genre: Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing
Publisher: SCi
Developer: Funcom
Release Date: May 20, 2008

Cluttered and overpopulated as the MMO genre is, a game has to truly stand out in order to have the slightest chance of being successful. Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is a fantasy-based MMORPG like many that have came before it, but in its favor, it has two big strengths in the form of the Conan lore and a combat system that is much more active than anything else in the genre. The game is rated Mature and wholeheartedly embraces such ideas as decapitations and nudity, but thankfully only uses such things to augment the experience rather than rely on them to sell the title.

Age of Conan is fully set in Conan lore, in a time when three mighty nations are warring with each other while an advancing army of ghostlike soldiers threatens the survival of all three countries. Though Conan has changed somewhat over the years, the lore itself has always grasped rather mature concepts, such as Conan frequently cleaving his enemies into bloody pieces and never staying alien to things such as sex and nudity. In Age of Conan, sex is only referenced and nudity is limited to breasts and nipples, but blood and gore is apparent quite often.  

The combat system is unlike most MMOs in that it is less a matter of standing still and pressing hotkeys and much more reliant upon actively managing your attacks and defense and positioning your character to inflict maximum damage. Pressing the 1 key makes your character attack using an upper left swing, the 2 key makes your character attack directly forward, and the 3 key employs an upper right swing. There is no auto-attack option, and for the most part, these three keys make up the bulk of how you engage the enemy. When an enemy is highlighted, you can see which areas he is blocking in the form of three curved symbols on either side and above him. Every enemy has three of these, and they change depending on how you attack them.

For instance, if you constantly attack directly forward, the enemy will begin to defend that area more actively, until finally they have all three symbols in that area making him all but perfectly defended against that direction of attack. Of course, at that point he will have no defenses on either side of him, so it's also important that combat uses attacks that hit the enemy where he's weakly defended. The player also has these defense areas, which default to one in each direction for even defense but can be changed if the player finds that he is taking damage from one direction more consistently than the others.

Every class also has a variety of special abilities, some of which are simply used by pressing the key on the hotbar and others that are only performed in a combo. For instance, the Assassin's sweep ability is used by first pressing the hotkey and then successfully performing three attacks to the upper right. Only then is the move performed, hitting a wide swath of enemies with one sweeping attack to cap off the combo. Of course, if the enemy is blocking in that direction, the move will have less of an effect, which again plays into using abilities when the time is right and trying to get the enemy to favor defending one side only to blast him with a powerful attack from another.

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Resource: Worthplaying