Jotunnslayer: Hordes of Hel - Conan (DLC)

Jotunnslayer: Hordes of Hel is a roguelike horde-survivor - think Vampire Survivors meets Norse cosmology - where you carve through endless waves of enemies, stack divine blessings from Viking deities, and push further into increasingly hostile worlds until something eventually kills you and you start refining your build all over again. The Conan DLC drops the legendary Cimmerian barbarian into this framework, giving players a new playable character with his own playstyle sitting on top of the base game's foundation. The core loop is tight. You fight, you earn blessings, you scale into something monstrous, and then a boss shows up to test how well you actually built your character. What keeps this genre interesting is build variety, and Jotunnslayer leans hard into that. The divine blessing system draws on a recognizable Norse pantheon, so there is genuine flavor here beyond raw numbers - Odin, Thor, the darker corners of Hel's domain. Whether those blessings feel meaningfully distinct or blend into a stat-stacking haze by hour ten is the real question for long-term players, and it's worth noting the game sits at 83% positive across a healthy review sample, which suggests most people are getting enough out of it. Conan as a DLC character is a smart licensing fit. He is a sword-and-sorcery archetype built for exactly this kind of relentless combat scenario, and if Games Farm leaned into his pulp fantasy identity - raw strength, brutality, minimal magical dependency - he should play differently enough from the base roster to justify the pick-up. The Norse setting and Robert E. Howard's Hyborian age are not natural neighbors, but horde-survivors have always been happy mixing mythological furniture, and at this scale of chaos it barely matters. The honest caveats: this genre rewards players who enjoy repetitive session structure and incremental optimization more than narrative payoff. There are no dialogue trees here, no branching quest lines, no moments where a character's arc lands and you sit back from the keyboard. If you need story momentum to stay engaged past the two-hour mark, Jotunnslayer is not that game. It is a score-attack machine dressed in Viking fur. For players who like finding broken synergies and running one more attempt to push deeper into Hel's territory, the repetition is the point. The roguelike framework also means your tolerance for starting over matters. Progression between runs exists - there are typically meta-upgrades in games of this type - but each session begins from a position of relative fragility before the blessings start compounding. That opening window is either satisfying tension or tedious preamble depending on your temperament. Given the review reception, the balance seems calibrated well enough for most players in the genre. Bottom line: if you already own the base game and have genuine affection for Conan as a character, this DLC is a clean reason to revisit. If you are coming in fresh, the base game is where to start before committing to character expansions.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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