Majesty 2 The Fantasy Kingdom Sim

Posted 3 years ago By - Brian Edey

In the world of Majesty, you are the ruler of the kingdom of Ardania. At your service are your loyal and somewhat obnoxious subordinates, who have their own minds about how things should be done. Majesty is the only game where your heroes decide on their own what should be done and when, leaving you to try to control them through monetary incentives.

Gameplay

The main goal of the game of Majesty 2 is for you to rule your kingdom but unlike other kingdom simulators you do not micromanage every little detail. This is a great idea and when your heroes actually perform the way you expected them to you will love the game, but more often than not, the heroes of my kingdom were lost, lazy or just not doing what they were told to do.

When you start out the level you have your keep and a couple of peasants, well most of the time, and from here you must build various buildings (called guilds) to recruit, equip and train heroes. You will also build and upgrade other buildings such as guard towers that are very helpful in defending your town when your heroes are off on an adventure or two.

Each building allows you to build and train a specific type of hero such as clerics, rangers and warriors. Rangers are your scouts and will travel the land exploring, plus they have great long range weapons, clerics are the healers and also can attack and defend themselves but the warrior is the tank and all around damage dealer. Knowing how many to build of each one and how to group them together is important. Sadly the game does not exactly make this easy because it seemed every single level I was fighting a losing battle against hordes of undead or some various other creature and could never get my heroes to band together to fight as a team or even be in the same area.

Your heroes follow commands, or when they are not ignoring them, by certain flags you place around the map. From go here and scout it out, to attack or defend an area or NPC. But to entice a hero to get off his or her duff you must provide a gold incentive to make it worthwhile and sometimes it costs a lot of gold so before you attack a graveyard make sure you have enough money stored up so more than a single ranger will attack it.

There is a multiplayer option for those who wish to go online or play via a LAN, but there is only eight maps to play and no map editor so unless we see a patch with more maps multiplayer is going to quickly become a bust.

Graphics and Audio

The graphics of Majesty 2 are for the most part good. They do their job, each building, NPC and Hero are easy to distinguish from each other and every landmark is noticeable across the map. But the graphics do begin to fail in the animation department with all of the animations looking stiff and out of place. The user interface is also badly done and feels very cluttered and just the overall look of the game does not say “Fantasy” to me it feels like a generic medieval setting game with elves thrown in just to call it a fantasy title.

Audio wise the game hits the mark in music and sound effects, with only a few minor sound effect issues but nothing that is noticeable unless you are looking for them, but the voice work is very bad and I cannot tell if the voice actors were going for funny and failed or just were bad at it. I know it can be hard for a team to nail video games voice acting but there are dozens of games in the last couple of years with fantastic voice acting to learn from and in today’s games, we gamers do like the voices we hear in the games we play to sound at the very least good.

Value

Sadly games like this seem to have less and less overall replay value than their older counterparts from a few years ago. Replaying the single player campaign is not as fun the second time and multiplayer is far from entertaining after a couple of weeks of hard core gaming.

Bottom Line

This game has a rich legacy behind it with the original Majesty so expectations were very high that this is one game that would have and could have taken the kingdom simulation a step further but it feels like the game has stalled out. If there was some actual replay value in the game and AI/pathfinding was improved along with some User Interface tweaks I would easily say this was a buy, but right now I am right on the edge of saying buy or stay away. Perhaps in a few months of patches the game will have improved enough to nudge me one way or the other.