If you fancy spending the weekend surrounded by beefy barbarians—and who doesn't?—then you're in luck. Funcom's hosting a free weekend for all of its Conan games on Steam. Technically, there are three of them, though Age of Conan: Unchained has been free-to-play since 2011. 

The Conan MMO was one of the best-looking games around when it launched (originally with a subscription) in 2008, and one of the bloodiest MMOs. It was far more story-driven than its contemporaries and had an unusual combat system, but I'm still surprised that it's managed to keep its head above water when so many other MMOs have vanished. It's already free, but the Hyborean Collector's Edition, which contains four expansions and a vanity item, is 60 percent off until September 30. 

Conan Exiles is probably best known for its penis slider, but if you've ever wondered if the survival game has more to offer than big cocks, now's your chance to take a look. The solo experience is pretty dull—there's a reason nobody wrote a book about Conan building a house—but you can also band together with other players, fight in sieges and watch avatars of the gods smash up towns. 

Finally, there's Petroglyph's survival RTS, Conan Unconquered. There's all the armies, building and resource management of your standard RTS, but instead of duking it out with other players or factions, you'll need to protect your city from the relentless attacks of Thurga Khotan and his army of bandits and monsters. There's also a co-op mode where you can team up with a mate to defend the city. 

You can play Conan Exiles and Conan Unconquered for free until September 23, and they're both discounted until September 30.

Petroglyph's Cimmerian RTS Conan Unconquered has a new release date, and happily it's not a delay—it's actually a very slight move-up, from May 30 to May 29. With a new date set, publisher Funcom has also locked down exactly what sort of hardware you'll need if you want to play it. 

Minumum:

• Windows 7, 8 or 10 (64 bit)
• 8GB of RAM
• Core i3 (dual core) @3Ghz+ or equivalent
• Intel HD Graphics 620 or DX11 graphics card w/ minimum 1GB dedicated RAM
• Storage – 10GB

Recommended:

• Windows 7, 8 or 10 (64 bit)
• 8GB of RAM
• Core i5 (quad core) @3Ghz+ or equivalent
• Nvidia Geforce GTX 970 or AMD RX580 or better
• Storage – 10GB

We got some hands-on time with a preview build of Conan Unconquered in March, and it looks quite promising as a "survival RTS" with echoes of They Are Billions. "Unconquered is derivative, but it's clearly a competent survival RTS, and it's built to support co-op right from the start," Wes wrote. "That, to me, makes it worth playing."

As for the reason behind the new release date, Funcom chief product officer Lawrence Poe said only that the developers are "eagerly looking forward to launch and to getting Conan Unconquered into the hands of players. The game has really come together and although the skill cap is high, it's tremendously fun to play."   

Conan Unconquered is available for pre-purchase on Steam for $30/£25/€30 and there's a website with more up at conanunconquered.com.

Conan Unconquered is a survival RTS being developed by Petroglyph that pits the mighty barbarian and his armies against endless waves of enemies. Wes took a preview build for a spin last month and found it "derivative" but "clearly competent," and particularly appealing because of its built-in support for co-op play, which enables two players to work together to build and defend a shared stronghold. 

With release set to take place on May 30, publisher Funcom has released a new video showing off a few minutes of gameplay. Much of it looks like fairly standard RTS stuff: Resources must be extracted and managed, and pursuing research trees will open the door to new units and abilities. But there are a few more unusual elements to it as well. 

Conan himself, along with other heroes, makes a personal appearance in the game and can actually handle early-game troubles on his own. But sooner or later things will start to get out of hand, and you'll have to start building and upgrading a stronghold. That eventually leads to a problem: As you massacre hundreds (thousands?) of invaders, their bodies will pile up and putrefy, leading to disease that can spread and debilitate your forces. In case that's not bad enough, those rotting corpses are also fodder for necromancers, who can reanimate their skeletons into new enemy forces. 

On the upside, pursuing a certain research path will give Conan the ability to call upon the avatar of Mitra, a massive embodiment of a Hyborian deity that can crush people and buildings beneath its feet. Downside: It's not too particular about whose people and buildings it stops into paste—human concerns are beneath the notice of the gods—and so you might want to watch where you aim this bad boy once he's fired up. 

Your heroes will also have the opportunity to explore the game world and battle temple guardians for artifacts that will grant unique powers. Overall, I think Conan Unconquered looks promising: Not necessarily revolutionary, but with enough going on to keep things interesting. It's available for pre-purchase from Steam for $30/£25/€30.

They Are Billions was a refreshing take on what has always been the most fun way to play RTS games: turtling. It helped coin the idea of the "survival" RTS, a game where you spend most of your time building a base to collect resources to survive waves of enemies, much like in a tower defense game. Funcom's Conan Unconquered, which is out on May 30, doesn't do anything particularly new with this idea, but it has co-op, and that is a very good thing.

My favorite RTS memories ever are from playing Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 online with friends. We'd team up against a bunch of hard enemy bots and treat the game like a survival RTS, building our bases right next to each other and specializing in different defensive options that were fearsome when combined. I'd play as France and build the massive, long-range Grand Cannons while one of my friends frantically built and rebuilt layers of concrete walls in front of them to keep enemy tanks out of range. Anyway, Conan Unconquered is being made by Petroglyph, a studio comprised of former Command & Conquer devs, so that wasn't a totally pointless tangent.

I played about half an hour of Conan Unconquered during GDC last week, which was enough to get a taste for the absolute basics. My co-op partner and I could each build structures and control our own units, and we had separate money pools. But crucially, our income and resource-earning was identical, based on the total number of farms and other resource-granting buildings we made. This allowed for specialization: I could've focused on building up our economy while he focused on the army, if we were coordinated enough.

Every few minutes, hordes of enemies come pouring in from different directions on the map, and we needed troops, guard towers, and walls to hold them off. Conan Unconquered also gives you heroes (like, erm, Conan) who are much tougher and can use a special ability in battle. If they die, they'll respawn after a cooldown.

I really satisfied my RTS turtling itch by building a wall around the southern half of our base, then placing guard towers behind it and filling them with units who could throw spears down at the hordes. Like They Are Billions, the theme is getting attacked by tons of enemies at once, who were all extremely weak at the start but will doubtless grow stronger and more varied over the course of the game. There's some value in exploring the map, here, killing random creatures to level up your heroes and have greater vision on where the hordes are coming from. Your building placement also matters somewhat: I noticed that placing some food-producing facilities near a lake made them much more efficient, for example. That should at least add a bit of depth to the process of deciding how and where you build your base.

Conan Unconquered has a bit of a budget look and feel to it. The UI is intuitive but a bit ugly, the aesthetic a generic fantasy Age of Empires. My hero repeated the same voice clip every time I gave her a command, and it was some of the worst voice acting I've ever heard repeated ad nauseum. Not exactly the personality I was looking for. I like Arnold Schwarzenegger's Conan the Barbarian quite a bit, but there's nothing here on the level of Arnie punching a camel or James Earl Jones turning into a giant damn snake. God that movie was weird. This game doesn't have any of that flavor, although you can call in a deity's giant foot to stomp the hell out of the bad guys, Monty Python-style. That's actually pretty cool.

Unconquered is derivative, but it's clearly a competent survival RTS, and it's built to support co-op right from the start. That, to me, makes it worth playing. Turtling's simply more fun with a friend.

Conan Unconquered, announced in December, pits the beefy Cimmerian and his warriors against hordes of unrelenting enemies, eager to tear down walls and turn all the defenders into grisly, mutilated corpses. Very pleasant! We only got screenshots and a cinematic trailer last year, but the latest video shows off footage from a recent alpha build, along with developer interviews. Take a gander above. 

As it did in the screenshots, it continues to call to mind Age of Empires and Stronghold Crusader, but unlike those RTS games, Conan Unconquered is a survival strategy affair, with the devs name dropping both Frostpunk and They Are Billions as major sources of inspiration. They remain two of the best examples of the burgeoning genre, but Petroglyph has lots of its own strategy games to draw upon, too. 

You'll still need to go out and hunt for resources, research new tech, build up your city and manage your economy, just like Age of Empires, but you'll also need to fend off attacks from waves of invaders. Expect to fight everything from simple human enemies to massive monsters, each apparently boasting different behaviours. You'll have to watch out for other threats, too, from disease to sandstorms. Honestly, I think moving sounds like the better option. 

Petroglyph also broke down the co-op. You'll be able to team up with another player through matchmaking and deal with more challenging waves hitting you from multiple directions early on. It also means you can split the work, however, so one of you can protect the walls, and the other can go off looking for resources or fighting battles beyond the city. I'm usually undone by my impatience in They Are Billions, getting too eager and losing the city because of it, so it would be nice to have someone backing me up when I do something stupid. Or it could just mean double the stupidity. 

Conan Unconquered is due out this year.