Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim

Here’s the deal: you’re not the adventurer this time. You’re the king. The guy that hires the warriors, the rogues, priests and wizards, rewarding them for the risks they take in robbing tombs, killing evil wizards, defending your palace and other mundane tasks in the fantasy kingdom of Ardania. You stick the reward posters up and hireling adventurers will do their part if they want to earn a crust, while you get on with the business of managing your kingdom. As a gamer, this sounds like you’re getting a bum deal, but in practice getting other people to do the questing is surprisingly good fun.

The thrust of Majesty 2 is that you have no direct control over your subjects – all you can do is to provide financial incentives for performing four different types of task, either to attack, defend, explore or fear. The first three are fairly self-explanatory: nearby monster dens such as bear caves, haunted tombs and portals of hell need flagging with an Attack flag to destroy these generators, thus preventing their denizens from attacking you. You’ll use a Defend flag more often later in the game when your kingdom comes under threat, you’ll use Explore frequently at the start of each map when much of the land is under a fog of war, and a Fear flag will prevent your heroes from wandering into areas you don’t want them to.

Heroes will mass in groups to a flag (or not, in the case of the Fear flag) if you attribute enough gold to it, with more risky quests requiring bigger incentives. By upgrading your Inn, you can gather specific heroes into parties of four that will stick together to provide safety in numbers and also improve each other’s stats. Being on the other side of an RPG is an unusual and pleasing experience, as is watching your brave subjects rally towards your flag and fight side-by-side – especially with the attention that 1c:Ino-Co has paid to the fine details.

Each hero has the innate abilities you’d expect from their class, so rogues are adept at poisoning and backstabbing, clerics heal other heroes and dispel undead, wizards are fragile but have an arsenal of offensive spells, warriors revel in melee and rangers have powerful ranged attack. But they also have intrinsic motivations. So rogues, for example, will be first to flee an overwhelming battle, rangers are first on the scene for exploration quests and warriors will rush bravely to attack or defend almost anything, often remaining until the job is done. Killing monsters and completing quests will reward your heroes with experience points too and you will benefit from having a large number of more robust, able and enthusiastic high-level heroes. Contrary to what we’d expected, we felt all the more attached to these industrious minions for having no direct control over them.

Sadly you can’t carry them all over to the next part of your campaign, but you can elect your best hero from each map to become a lord, including them in a pool to be summoned onto subsequent maps, at a price. Several maps into a campaign and you’ll be able to call upon some high-level heroes, who you’ll become rather fond of and whom you’ll rely heavily upon to bolster the noobs hired from the guilds in later levels.

Offering incentives to a somewhat unpredictable bunch of adventurers isn’t your sole responsibility though. Managing them effectively involves providing certain facilities and ensuring a steady income for your kingdom. Heroes need health potions, mana potions, magic talismans of regeneration, armour of varying qualities and weapon upgrades. For that, a market place and a blacksmith will both see to their basic needs and provide you with a regular source of income as heroes return from quests to replenish their supplies. For a relatively small gold investment, you can create a thriving economy without having to rely upon treasure caches discovered using Explore flags. This is the business side to Majesty 2’s charming facade; it’s the rewarding underbelly to a game whose challenge scales upwards with the threat to your kingdom, and it adds substance to what could have otherwise been a quirky but essentially shallow experience.

Majesty 2 sets the mood by working a very tongue-in-cheek storyline around the game. Your ancestor King Leonard, so it goes, feared that his place in history would never be guaranteed in the shadow of his predecessor’s feats of heroism. So he decided to have his court wizards summon a powerful demon, then try to banish it. He failed and the demon seized control of the throne, so now Ardania is threatened with everlasting chaos unless you, King Leonard’s sole heir, can defeat it. The unconventional backdrop suits Majesty 2 perfectly, and it’s a consistent theme throughout the campaign. Quests on each new map include killing an ogre for your half-elf auntie and freeing a village from a gourmet cheese-loving, plague-infested Rat King.

If it wasn’t for the fact that Majesty 2 will punish you if you don’t keep a close eye on your kingdom and subjects, you could almost consider it a suitable game for younger children, with its jocular nature and slapstick approach to fantasy death and destruction. There’s a hint of a sense of humour lost in the Russian-to-English translation (naming the end game boss Baron Of Logic instead of a chaos demon left us slightly perplexed), but Majesty 2 managed to elicit the odd chuckle from a magazine team with a decidedly refined sim game palate.