17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
How to Relax During the Lunch Hour, October 16, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: Majesty (Mac) (CD-ROM)
Majesty for the Mac (and also for the PC) is a major league addictive recreation and time sink in our household (and both my wife and I are old enough to know better). Consequently, we've had to limit our playing to lunchtime, evenings, and/or weekends, or we won't get anything done.
This strategy game combines some of the more enjoyable aspects of Sim City and various fantasy role-playing games. You are the monarch of a small kingdom, facing a variety of challenges from the simple to extremely difficult (depending upon scenario). Your job is to survive and win; the catch is that not all of your subjects understand the task at hand (nor are they always up for the challenge); and the various monsters and "creatures of the night" are doing their best to destroy both your kingdom and you. (It can be very disheartening to watch your castle being destroyed by a wave of fire-breathing dragons - found in one of the more challenging scenarios - while your various heroes, who are your main defenders, are off chasing minor monsters.)
On the other hand, if you chose a scenario where the odds are in your favor, then you can easily take out your frustrations with the everyday world in a burst of heroic leadership in less than an hour's time. The graphics are good, but not gory; so the faint-of-stomach (or with mothers who are) shouldn't worry about seeing excessive violence (I've seen worse in made-for-television movies).
Majesty requires you to chose between supporting "good", or orderly, clerics and "evil", or chaotic, ones, depending upon scenario. (Both, however, can give you a victory.) How much magic is necessary to use also varies with scenario (magic-users can be critical to your victory or merely a distraction). For people who want gender equality or support political correctness based on gender, it is also worth noting that half of both the stronger fighters, and clerics (of both alignments), are female. (The monsters occur in both sexes, too.)
At the higher level, a good deal of puzzle-solving is required; but at the intermediate level, it's mainly just-plain-fun "monster-bashing" (and as long as you exercise a minimum of caution, generally a victory over the "forces-of-evil"). The basic level scenarios are primarily a way of teaching you the finer points of the game (a very useful feature) as is the manual, though unfortunately the latter is not perfectly clear (I had to get my adult son, who owns a PC version of the game, to explain some of the details before being able to master the game). Barring that one problem, I have nothing but praise for both the game and the quality of its design; I haven't had this much fun with a fantasy-based computer game since I played Wizardry.
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24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A fun fantasy game, December 26, 2000
This review is from: Majesty (Mac) (CD-ROM)
(NOTE: this review is based on the demo. I have liked the demo enough to buy the full version.)
While any fantasy kingdom-building game will be compared to Warcraft, this game is not just another WC clone. The developer bills it as a "fantasy kingdom sim" instead of an RTS game. The biggest change is that you never give orders to individual units. This is very nice if you don't like the mad click-fest that Warcraft can become when you're trying to order around large numbers of units. Instead, you recruit heroes from the guilds, then manipulate their attacks through placing bounties. Heroes can gain experience levels as they hunt monsters, and spend the gold they earn on better equipment (such as better weapons, magic rings, potions, etc.) The levels have a set quest for you to accomplish before you move to the next level.
If there's anything keeping this review from 5 stars, it's that you almost don't do enough... once all your buildings are set up, you can sit back and watch most of the time. On the other hand, that is more in the spirit of Sim-type games, which is what they were aiming for.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A uniquely addictive game, April 18, 2001
This review is from: Majesty (Mac) (CD-ROM)
While Majesty looks like a fairly standard real-time empire building and goal-oriented scenario game, its unique interface is what keeps you playing. Rather than directly controlling your "game pieces," i.e., the various fantasy heroes you enlist to help build your kingdom, you can only place rewards for certain activities. Need to find something in this scenario? Then an exploration reward will send heroes off to push back the fog of unexplored terrain. Dragon attacking your castle? A price on its head brings the heroes running.
The mix of scenarios is good, providing a good path to learning how the kingdom works while being a challenge to complete. The ability to create freestyle quests and also to download quests adds to the game's variety. My only quibbles are that the scenarios don't tie together into a good plotline. While you cannot attempt some until completing others, there is no "story" behind the greater task of completing all of them. It would also be an interesting addition if heroes from one quest could be recruited into another.
The graphics are stunning, the game play smooth and easy to pick up. Music and sound effects are good, with some particularly cute utterances by some characters. This is a fun game and it's great to see it for the Mac.
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