The second game in the Majesty franchise, Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim is a huge improvement over the original title, and not just in the ways you would expect from a new version (like better graphics). The team at Paradox has really punched it up in several ways. The first Majesty was a bit clunky, and at times even boring. It had a certain charm, of course, and to many it’s a classic, but most of its appeal came from its novelty. It was a game in a new style, something we hadn’t seen before: an RTS that lets you back off and control the action the way a real leader would, not by directly being the hand that controls and builds everything, but by giving orders and suggestions to the denizens, and only being in direct control of a small part of the kingdom.
A typical view during the game. I kept health bars set to "Always on" while I played.
Majesty 2 takes that original premise, and works it up into a more intuitive, and interesting, game than Majesty was. Of course, we’ve also got the technological improvements: Better graphics, smoother controls, a flexible camera, and the ability to have a larger number of actors on-screen at a time. However, there a a few places where the improvements could have done with a little more…improving.
Pursuit
Here’s the premise: You are the last heir to the throne of your homeland, but a usurper (a demon usurper, no less) is sitting in your place. The people follow you, but the demon has the real power. Your job is to slowly win back power from the demon over the course of 15 missions.
The 15 missions (plus a tutorial mission) are arrayed across the map of the kingdom.
The basic layout will be very familiar to anyone who plays RTSes with any regularity, and many of the mechanics are identical, at least on the surface, to every other RTS you know. You will quickly realize, however, that as the king, you only have control over a small part of the kingdom–and only in a very limited way. Here are the things you can do: Build buildings, research techs, hire heroes, and place flags. That’s it. If you didn’t play the first Majesty, you may still be assuming “Sure that’s it, other than clicking on those heroes and telling them where to go.” Well, that’s not part of this game, and that’s the thing that, more than anything else, separates it from other games in the genre. The heroes are not controlled directly, they can only be controlled with “flags”.
If there are no flags on the map, then each hero just wanders around, defending the town, looking for gold, whatever his class dictates. You can place 4 types of flag: Explore, Protect, Attack, and Avoid. These flags become suggestions to the heroes, who choose for themselves whether to follow them. You can entice them to follow a flag by placing gold (the only resource in the game) on it as a prize for the action. The more gold you put on a flag, the more likely that each hero will respond to it, and as the heroes go up in level, they will require larger prizes to keep them interested in what you want them to do. The only time this doesn’t seem to do anything is with the Avoid flags, which seem to do the same thing whether or not you put a prize on them. Of course the class of the hero also determines interest level, as fighters are more likely to respond to attack flags, and rangers are more likely to respond to explore flags, etc.
You can see that I've placed an "Attack" flag on this evil wizard's tower.
What about the rest of the economy, and other kingdom-running stuff? No need, it’s all taken care of for you. The peasants build their own houses and workplaces (in addition to helping you build your buildings, and recruiting their own new peasants when some get eaten by a dragon or something), the tax collector collects taxes, the guards keep the peace. The only thing you need to worry about is the heroes: Build their guilds and shops, research new toys for them, and pay them to do stuff for you.
The entire economy is based on these heroes. You use your starting money to hire a few heroes, then you rely on them to find gold, and spend it in your shops. In this way, you make more money with which to hire more heroes or build more buildings. The major strategic element is deciding how fast to hire new heroes, versus using the money to research new equipment for the current heroes to purchase from your shops. Secondary to that, one must choose which types of heroes to hire, although that’s more learned than it is strategic: Hire more clerics for maps with undead, and more rangers for maps with best types of monsters, and never let a fighter go adventuring without a party (the fighters aren’t very good at picking fights that they can win).
A graveyard is built by the peasants after your first hero death in each map. I don't know where dead peasants are buried.
Partying the heroes becomes very important later on in the game, and one of the most fun aspects of each mission. Rather than having each hero separate from the others in motivation and function, you can use an upgrade at your tavern to group them into parties of four. The strategy here is pretty straightforward: make a diverse group. Just remember that the leader of the party chooses which flags the party goes for. There is an issue here, however–the method for selecting the parties is a bit cumbersome. You announce at the tavern that you are looking to create a party, then you wait for heroes to show up. This works fine for the first few parties you make in a map, but the more parties you make, the longer it takes for the remaining unpartied heroes to show up, which can take a lot of time away from other parts of the game. As much as I liked seeing my parties of heroes head out to do my bidding, I was really wishing that creating those parties was easier. I would have been happy with just a list of the heroes, from which I could designate a party. The act of assembling all my heroes into parties should not take 10 minutes each map. A way to replace dead party member without disbanding the party first would also have been nice.
The missions themselves are rather linear. There are a few points when the player gets to choose the order in which they do certain missions, but this is the exception, not the rule, and the missions themselves are all very straightforward; most of them are simply “build up your heroes until you are strong enough to kill this bad guy”. In general a basic strategy of “turtling” until your heroes are so powerful that nothing can possibly withstand them seemed to work. I kept waiting for the game to throw a mission at me which defied my turtle strategy, and it never came. Each mission included at least one point when I had built up as much as I needed, and just wanted some more money and some more hero levels before confronting the bad guy, so I just put it on 5x speed and walked away for a while, SimCity-style.
Some variety is added by opening up some features and mechanics of the game slowly. Some of the hero classes aren’t even available until half way through the campaign, and there are four artifacts that you must find along the way, each of which gives your heroes a new bonus. You can also take one hero per mission with you into the following missions, which helped to tie things together into an actual campaign. Unfortunately, you can’t bring your heroes or artifacts with you on the the non-campaign maps, which really makes them not worth playing.
The artifacts get stored on the ribbon near the top-left corner of the screen.
Panorama
All of the art is nice and colorful, and each element is easy to distinguish. In fact, it feels like making sure everything is distinguishable was a major priority of the artistic design. One can easily pick out each building and hero, just by looking at it. I only once clicked on the wrong building (the level 1 Rogues’ Guild looks a little like the evel 2 Inn), and that to me says “successful art design”, as opposed to games like Command and Conquer (any of them) where I have to usually click on several buildings to find the one I want. The only thing here that wasn’t well diferentiated was the mini-map: Every building is a little house, and every character is a little dot. Different icons for different buildings would have made navigation and planning a bit easier.
The mini-map icons leave a bit to be desired.
Reins
Controlling the game is exactly what you’re used to as an RTS player. There could have been more keyboard shortcuts, and they could have been customizable, but with as few things as one actually needs to do in a level, it wasn’t really a concern. The camera had full rotation and fluid zoom.
No problem taking a closer look at what your heroes are up to.
Noise
The music is your standard generic fantasy stuff; lots of flutes and stuff. It never got repetitive or annoying, which brings us to the voice acting. I did not like the voice acting for two reasons: The first is that most of the humor in the game comes from the bumbling advisor, who is doing a fair Sean Connery impression for the whole game. His humor is a bit cliche, and more than a little lame. He also feels it necessary to inform you every time something happens in the kingdom, which is fine, except that his lines are not short. “Your Majesty, a new building has been completed” gets a little old, especially at the beginning of each map, when you’re building about 20 buildings in quick succession (at one point, I had to completely turn off the voice because my wife was in the same room, trying to work, and it was getting on her nerves). All of his announcements are unnecessarily long. Think of the Age of Empires franchise: How do you know when stuff happens? A finished building makes a little “ca-chunk” noise, and a new unit maks a rattling noise, and so forth, stuff that starts to fade into the background unless needed. That kind of thing would have worked here just fine.
Much of the hokey dialog was also spelled out for you in boxes at the top of the screen. Note also: the text describing the enemy building in the frame.
In fact, all of the voice acting was a bit hokey. It’s like they got to the voice-acting part of the game development, and decided that this game was not going to take itself seriously, but honestly, I think it could have done with taking itself seriously, my personal enjoyment of the game would have been increased about 25% if the game had not presented itself as one big joke. You need serious talent to pull off hokey properly (like Red Alert, for example), but if all you have is normal talent (I’m still just talking about the voice acting here) hokey just doesn’t work.
Encoding
I found a few bugs in my playthrough. I had one mission crash on me over and over, requiring me to use the auto-save feature judiciously in order to get through it, and the screen wouldn’t pan properly unless I switched the program affinity to run on only one core. However, not only did I have a pre-release version of the game, but I only tested it on this one system, so there is every chance that these issues are either fixed, or were unique to me.
Last Word
Majesty 2 is a fun game with a few quirks. I would actually call it a “Casual Real-Time Strategy” game. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, by any means; some of the maps were quite harrowing, but with only one aspect of the kingdom under the player’s control, only one resource to manage, and the story and solutions being so linear, it doesn’t really have the depth of strategy that many long-time RTS players expect. If you are a RTS player looking for a more casual offering, or someone looking to get into RTS games with more lighthearted example of the genre, this game would be a perfect fit for you.
Majesty 2 is available now via Amazon or Steam.
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