…continued
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.