Majesty is officially classified as a "god-sim". It has quite a bit in common with most real-time strategy games, nevertheless, it succeeds in setting itself apart from all those games to stand out with a flair of original brilliance. You build your town, some guilds, a marketplace, blacksmith and some guardhouses, and make a general start to building your empire. Now the difference here is that when you recruit heroes from their respective guilds, you cannot order them around. You can influence their actions by placing either Attack or Explore flags around the map with a certain bounty, but for most of the time your heroes will simply do what they want. Lucky for you, the heroes are actually pretty intelligent and don't randomly wander about until they get killed. Some heroes will stay and protect your city whilst others, like the ranger, prefer to roam around the map and stir up trouble, whilst the favorite past-time of Level 1 wizards is to get themselves killed rapidly within 30 seconds of being recruited. The heroes behave like any hero would in an RPG game. They have certain statistics and spells, and as they gain experience levels and money, they gain more hit points, higher statistics, purchase better items from your blacksmith/marketplace and, I cannot really confirm this, but they seem to make some smarter decisions now and again. A Level 2 Warrior will get into a fight, berserk, fail to use any manner of health potions, and die. A level 9 warrior will usually use health potions whilst fighting, and run away if he starts to loose.

Those are the basics of the game, but the more you play, the more enjoyable it becomes as you discover the 7 guilds and their respective monk/priests and spells. The game also starts to look better once you get some of your weiner wizards racked up too mighty overlord Wizard people who really start to kick any monsters ass with big colorful spells, making the game look a whole lot better.

The single player campaign in Majesty, though randomly generated, is somehow still always fun to play. Also, the campaign missions can be completed in any order, but you better pay attention to whether the difficulty says "beginner, advanced or expert", because expert can be pretty darn hard. Every mission has some preset objectives, like some special structure you have to hack up (rescue prince = Hack up structure where he's held, recover item = hack up structure where it's kept, destroy structure). Granted, most of the missions seem to be seriously lacking in originality/variation of any kind, but somehow that doesn't really matter. There's enough variation to still keep you interested and once started, it's hard to stop as you watch your heroes progress to god almighty killing machines who can hack up some serious evil stuff.

Once you've finished the campaign mode, or perhaps just gotten bored of it, there's also a freestyle play mode, which offers a small host of options to randomly generate a map for you to play on. Because all the campaign maps are randomly generated anyway, this freestyle play can really lengthen your playing time of this game. It is also the same screen used for Multiplayer, as the only real difference tends to be that there are two kingdoms on the map instead of one. The nice thing here is that bounties can be placed on each others units/building, and then the other player can try and place an ever higher bounty on his oppositions hero; All heroes on the map, no matter who they 'belong' to, will go for bounties. You can place a bounty on your enemy's warrior's guild, and the warriors inside it will happily come out and start hacking it up for the money.

The graphics in Majesty are nothing special but at least the average looking models of the different units create a feeling of variety as the colors and shapes vary quite a bit. It is only when you start to see your high level units fighting big tuff bad guys that all the special effects start pouring onto the screen. The special effects can be *very* colorful and look very nice too, which is in sharp contrast to the normal casual feel of the graphics. Overall the graphics really aren't that good, but it still scores well because it gets the job done just fine. I'd sacrifice graphics for gameplay any time, and perhaps this should be another lesson to developers to stop focusing all their attention on the damn graphics and look at their lousy gameplay for a start.

In the graphics and sound category, this game is rather average, but as you play the game more, you realize it really doesn't matter that the sounds are repetitive. The voiceovers are slightly irritating and the graphics mediocre. Don't take any notice of that silly rating sub-system thingie that every reviewer is stuck with. Personally I just tailor the thing to what I want my final score to be, as a separate mark for every sector is simply completely irrelevant when playing the game as a whole.

Though I must say that not every person out there will like it, as some might find it too repetitive for their tastes, or perhaps have an unnatural hatred for mediocre graphics in a game, this is still a must for any god-sim and RTS fan out there. Way to go Cyberlore Studios, may you revel in fame and fortune for a while and live on to hopefully produce a Majesty 2.

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