A New Kingdom - Majesty 2 Review

Majesty 2 offers what can best be described as indirect control. You have to accomplish various tasks, such as killing monsters and protecting trade convoys, without any direct control over your soldiers. Your job as king is to build the guilds, draw in heroes, and establish a system that allows them to get new equipment. You can only influence their actions with certain flags. You can issue bounties on monsters, rewards for exploration, rewards for guard duty, and fear flags to bribe them to stay away from the giant monster.

This is a very fun twist. I don't know of many other good games that actually offer this. The real bonus is that each of the hero classes have their own quirks. Rangers are prone to exploration. Warriors will recklessly charge to any fight. Rogues will jump at any reward, and often hilariously fail. The clerics, wizards, and various religious warriors each have their own behaviors too.

The AI is also pretty good. They tend to be smart enough to run away from a losing fight and collect healing potions before they set out for any adventure. You won't have to do too much babysitting, except for a few really tough monsters that roam the land and devour your heroes.

Besides managing the different hero types, you'll also have to build up your town. Your heroes can buy poisons from the rogues, enchantments from the wizards, new weapons and armor from the blacksmith, and potions and charms from the marketplace. It actually forms a neat economy. Your heroes go on adventures and get loot from killing monsters. They return and submit some of that back to you in taxes. The rest is their money to spend, which will eventually work its way back to you as taxes on the marketplace and blacksmith when heroes upgrade or resupply. It's a neat system and one you don't see every day.

You can take direct intervention a few times. There are special king spells that you can cast to hurt monsters and aid your heroes. It's also now possible to form parties from any interested heroes who answer the call at the inn.

The one problem I have is that this seems to get very repetitive. There just isn't as much action as there used to be. The levels just seem to be the same. Ratmen, skeletons, wolves and bears attack. Your men kill them. They wait for action flags and then kill the big baddie. It just gets really stale. There also aren't that many monsters either, and they all have the same basic attacks. It just isn't nearly as interesting as the mix of the last one.

The graphics are pretty ugly. You should be able to see the low level of detail in the screenshots. I normally wouldn't nail an RTS for its graphics, but this is just really ugly. Some of the monsters have very little detail and a few of the heroes are quite non-descript. It's not terrible, it just looks dated and uninteresting.

The only saving grace is that the animations are quite nice. There are some well detailed attacks for the heroes and the spells are really well done. The particle effects are just cool and I'm always impressed by shiny lights. There is also a physics system. Heroes can be thrown backwards until they hit something. It's mainly just a novelty, but it's a nice touch that I'm glad they added.

It's at this point that I'd like to add a pet peeve. Why did they go to 3D? It seemed pointless. Nothing was gained and the graphics are just disappointing. A little thought just runs in the back of my mind about how awesome this would look with the same amount of time going into 2D models. There was nothing wrong with using 2D for a strategy game. Stronghold made this same mistake at the time the franchise jumped the shark. I know that the consumers seem to demand 3D graphics, but well done 2D graphics shouldn't be discarded just because. I'm very disappointed that they trashed the charm of the detailed 2D graphics for some generic 3D stuff.