Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim Review

Majesty is an ambitious project conceived by Cyberlore studio's programmers. It has all the basic features of both simulations and real time strategies. This game will give you a chance to create your own fantasy kingdom, employ heroes, take care of the finances and destroy enemy creatures. The story begins when your mother dies leaving you in charge of the kingdom and giving you all the responsibility for its further development and safekeeping.

In spite of the fantasy surroundings Majesty is more of a "sim" than most of the similar games, so it will probably be well accepted by Maxis fans. The player has no direct control of his minions: instead of selecting and commanding them you will have to motivate their moves. This is done using motivation flags. There are two types of motivation flags: exploration and bounty. Exploration flags are used for exploring the terrain, and bounty flags are used if you want to make your heroes hunt down an enemy. Your peons will take the assignment or ignore it depending on how much money you are willing to pay for it, and of course, their current tasks and status (if they are poor or unemployed they are more likely to take an assignment).

The command interface is functional, plain and clear. The game takes place in the middle part of the screen, which can be zoomed in or out. Current resources are displayed on the top of the screen. Minimap is located top-left and beneath it are unit commands and statistics. Bottom left is a camera following the currently selected unit. Objects in game can be separated into several categories, and most of them are support structures like the blacksmith (weapon upgrades), library (spell upgrades), guard towers (defense), taverns (heroes rest here in order to be able to travel more), and so on. You will need warriors, mages and ranges to defend your kingdom from its enemies. These are created in guilds and castles. From time to time will get a chance to hire elves and gnomes for a decent amount of money. The heroes accumulate experience and advance in levels. The highest level a hero can reach is ten.

The kingdom will grow slowly in the beginning of the game, but once you have built several combat and support structures there will not be much left to do. Your heroes will grow stronger and eliminate all the opposing forces, so all you will have to take care of is maintaining cash flow and defense structures. Majesty gives you a more passive position than Dungeon Keeper, which is much more dynamic and challenging. Majesty simply has an easily reachable end. The same can be said for the multiplayer mode, which becomes unbearably boring after some playing. You will come to a point where all you will be able to do is sit and wait, or occasionally hire a hero.

Majesty has certainly brought some new notions to the genre. Still, a hybrid like this, with inadequately combined conceptually different elements, is not too playable on its own. The ideas introduced here will hopefully be used in some future, more mature projects.