Cross-posting from the other blog.
There’s a lot of fantasy-based real-time strategy games available on retail, but none of them are quite like Majesty 2. I played the first game – aptly just called Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim – nearly 9 years ago, and have been really looking forward to this refresh of an old game.
The reviews on Majesty 2 have largely referred to it as a real-time strategy game where you don’t directly control your heroes. All you do is to build the infrastructure, the support establishments, and provide your heroes with incentives to protect your kingdom – and hope desperately they do just that!
When each mission starts, your castle is already placed for you and you get a small heap of starting gold in your treasury. You next build one of several professional types of guild – e.g. a fort for warriors, a tower for wizards, an archery gallery for rangers etc. Then set up recruitment posers to recruit and train a hero of that profession. You can also improve the establishment guild by spending more gold upgrading its facilities (e.g. fancy giving that new sword to all your newly minted warriors?).
Once the new recruit is done training, he emerges and is on his own. Yep, you get no direct control over what he does. Your newly minted hero could make a beeline for your inn!. Typically though new heroes like this new recruit are thirsty for adventure, so he’d go about looking for monsters on his own, roaming the landscape, basically mixing it up. In order to give your hero a bit of incentive and direction, you can also set bounties on mobs, lairs, monster hideouts and the like. Set a large enough bounty and you’ll get more heroes interest.
It’s not all about money expenditure in the form of tempting your heroes to do things by setting rewards though. Your income stream comes from two sources: taxation of peasants, and getting your heroes to spend their newly-earned coin, either on booze, or on buying equipment in one of your several economic establishments: blacksmiths, magic bazaars, and market places.
One of the great pleasures of Majesty 2 is watching your heroes grow, level up and increase in their prowess – assuming if they live long enough. A good strategic move is also to group them up smartly, as you typically do in an MMOG. A party of four could have a tank, a healer, a rogue for DPS, and a wizard for nuking. Or you could go nuts and form my personal favorite group compositions: four rampaging dwarves.:)
Frequently enough too in several missions, you’ll get the end-mission boss, and it’s a riot to set a several tens of thousand gold coins bounty on the Dragon / Vampire lord / Giant and see your several dozens of heroes and parties make a beeline for this raid level mob. The fights are colorfully rendered with audio effects of metal meeting flesh, spell effects going boomz, and attribute buffs firing off. When your parties meet a mob that’s too much for them to handle, you’ll get the party wipe – with all four persons potentially ending up in the cemetery, whereupon you can either pay a fee to get them resurrected, or dump them altogether and recruit new heroes to replace the fallen.
The game is by no means a perfectly-crafted production though. For starters, difficulty is a mess. The early missions are easy enough, but difficulty ramps up very quickly from mid-campaign onwards. The end-campaign mission in fact is almost impossible to beat unless you hit the discussion rooms to figure out a strategy, make use of third party cheat programs, or just cheat-edit the save game file yourself.
Voice-acting also takes some getting used to (Ling got unnerved by the narration and in-game commentary), and while maps are colorfully drawn and mildly reminiscent of cartoons operate only as eye-candy. i.e. a desert zone plays like a jungle zone that plays like a forest zone that plays like… you get the idea. The campaign isn’t that long either apart from the crushing difficulty mid-campaign onwards and the numerous retries many players will have to endure. And though there’s a multiplayer component, there’re just a handful of standalone scenarios.
Still, the game’s crazily addictive, and while the game can get frantic at moments – it’s still manageable with Hannah sitting on my lap.:)
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