Customer Reviews

Majesty (Mac)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

(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.

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.

Lots of fun - a cross between dungeons and dragons and sim city, with a little age of empires thrown in - nice graphics and music, and good gameplay - suitable for older children and adults alike. Highly recommended

I bought this game especially for my 9 year old son, but it's rich enough so that he and I can play it together and we both have fun. The simulated world is good and quite rich . You control the objectives of the characters rather than their individual destinations or actions which makes the game much less tedious as it progresses than alternative like warcraft. Although it's about killing mosnters, I find it less gruesome and disturbing for a young person that starcraft, for example, which we don't let our son play.
The network play over appletalk is good, but has gotten hung on us a coupleof times. The network play over TCP/IP (internet) is very buggy, a problem you don't discover until you pore over the README file. We never got it to work despite a moderate amount of fiddling.
While the world is as ich, or richer, than warcraft or other competing games, it is surprising to me that there is no way to add more "things" (creatures, etc) to the game. Also, I wish there were larger playing fields so that there was more room for developing your terrain as opposed to just hacking and slashing. The best thing about the game is that there are different styles of country development you must choose, and it takes some time to discover all of them. (For example if you develop "priestesses of Krypta" you are unable to build temples of some incompatible religions.)
All in all, I think it's one of the best games of it's genre, although it still has a few shortcomings.

In Majesty your only means of influence is by spending gold. You spend it by paying peasants to build guild halls and temples, hiring heros at those new buildings, and putting bounties on the heads of major monsters and their lairs. You get money from your tax collectors, as they travel your town and hopefully don't get killed by Ratmen and Trolls.

The included missions are mostly a fun bunch, with a few VERY tough ones in there, and you can design your own if you tire of those. Multiplayer is interesting, if not cross-platform. You can cooperate against major monsters, compete to raise gold faster, or even play "Last Castle Standing", though my one game of that with my brother lasted over 4 hours! In the end, I think it was our choice of heroes that decided it, rather than our tactical skills.

I agree with most of the other reviews that this game is well executed on the MAC. It is somewhat novel in that rather than directly controlling units like you would in a more traditional real-time strategy game like Starcraft or Command & Conquer, you indirectly bribe them into compliance. The graphics and sound are above average, comparable to most other RTS games, although they seemed a little flatter and less inpired than Starcraft. The biggest flaw with this game in my opinion is that it is way too easy for moderately experienced RTS players like myself. In the end, there seems to be little or no shortage of resources even on the "expert" levels. The heroes which you are supposed to bribe into helping you basically take out most of the monsters automatically anyway, leaving you with little to do. Finally, the single player missions are way too easy. I beat literally all of them the first time I played. In comparison to a game like Starcraft or Warcraft that took me days or weeks per mission to master, the missions in Majesty could all be solved in one sitting. So, overall a good game and a welcome addition to my game library, but ultimately too easy to master to offer any real replayability.

What an awesome game. We think it has it all. Great graphics.Fun game play.Finally,a game that my son has not grown bored with. Even after you beat all the different quests the free style games could keep you going indefinitely.

This game is cool because it is more realistic then other
games.Like your hero's gain levels and when they kill monsters they get money and puchase items or weapons.

Some hero's are greedy or ,will do any thing for treasure.
Others are loyal.There are two kinds of hero's that steal
from your kingdom.

You have choices elves, dwarves or, gmomes I like the
dwarves.

This is a great game. If you like sim city or the sims you'll probably like this. You have different quests where you explore land and fight evil creatures. Guys would love it but YOU are playing the Majesty so obviously its cool for girls too!