Majesty 2 Collection

TLDR: Don't waste your time or money on this travesty. I'm a HUGE fan of the original Majesty. So I was extremely excited to play this game. You can read the rest of the reviews here and see how the game is different from the first one (and objectively worse), but that really wasn't my problem. Supposedly they patched the game so that monsters spawn faster and buildings build slower. I don't know. I just started playing, so it may have already been broken and the devs just didn't care. Either way it makes the game unplayable. On most maps, there will be 6-7 monsters at your palace by the time your first building is ~75% done. And then your peasants get killed by said mob and don't finish your FIRST building. And you lose the mission. There are those that say you just need to learn how to use a glitch with speeding up time or use some crazy strategy, but at the end of the day this game was not playtested and in its current state is unplayable at worst and impossible to enjoy at best.

Firstly, Majesty 2 is nothing like Majesty 1. So if that's what you're looking for, you can stop. The game is quite tedious, the lore is noncontiguous (like temple restrictions being nonexistant, for instance), and the heroes' behaviors are quite watered down. On its own, the game is not very good. It forces you into creating your heroes/buildings in the order it would like you to, with little freedom to construct your own strategy. The enemies often show up in hordes with little time to prepare and get your heroes ready, which usually doesn't matter because they get scared and flee anyway. The only way I was finally able to get a hang of beating missions was by turning the game speed to the max and scrambling to build and rebuild structures and units to hold off the enemies, and by the time I finally had some semblance of what I wanted in my kingdom, the map was beaten. Every level felt like a sprint. And an obstacle course. And you're a parapalegic mole rat with a half a tail and an allergy to aerobics. The game felt like a chore. You have to set flags for your heroes to do anything, quickly draining your coffers, and you had to spend even more to recruit enough to replace the idiots that were either dead from a chance meeting with a goblin or drunk and passed out in an inn that they ran to when a spider showed up. The only improvement I relished was how the armor/weapon upgrades were finally visible, and some of the designs were pretty cool. The party system could have been fun, if the game didn't force you to create every one of them yourself and let the heroes do it intuitively when you didn't feel like supervising their every move. Overall, the game is an exercise in overmanagement and frustration with little resemblance to the gameplay of the first. The only reason to get it would be if you absolutely needed more of the setting in your life and you found it cheap. Two stars for the graphics and nostalgia, and I guess my wish for what I wanted it to be.

I own this game on Steam, and the only reason why I won't buy it here as well is that it's unbalanced when played on a modern system, I'll explain why: Many people seem not to know this, but your building speed and the enemy spawn rate are proportional to your framerate, for some reason, the faster your framerate, the slower your buildings complete, and the faster the enemies spawn. I forget the name of the mission, but there's one in which you need to defend your kingdom from drake attacks coming from multiple directions, you won't even have time to complete a guard tower before you're relentlessly attacked, especially with my vsync-capped framerate of 144 FPS Just download something like Rivatuner and cap the game's framerate to 30, and the experience will become a lot less painful, enjoy! (albeit at a "cinematic" framerate) Other than that I find it a really fun and enjoyable game, although I do think it's missing some of the first game's charm.

The game itself can be enjoyable if I wanted to play just fantasy RTS. But if you want to play the same type of RTS as Majesty, then, well ... the main failure, at least for me, is AI. The AI of your heroes in this game is the main feature. For me, you can not release a game in which the main feature is wa-a-a-y worse than in the original title 10 years ago!

Majesty 2 improves many things from Majesty 1 and try to become more like modern RTS game. Majesty 1 is more like a Sim with its uniqeness unlike any other game, harder to understand, more like a Sim & Puzzle game. You need to solve each map puzzle in quite a specific way since you have so many spells and construction tree choices to choose differently in each map. In Majesty 2, however, its uniqeness is reduced. It becomes more realtime-strategy focus like other RTS game. Combine RTS and Sim with less puzzle. More storyline campaign maps to take on from stage 1 to the last, just like any other RTS game would do. So, it system is more understandable than Majesty 1, more text description explaination, not a puzzle-focus anymore, which I like more. However, when compare to RTS game, its quality seem significantly lower than a good grade RTS storyline campaign game would be. The in-game cut-scene dialog always bug. There seem to be many bugs and glitch along the game which seem like an unfinished-testing incomplete game. In summary: Majesty 1 is uniqe. A realtime Sim & Puzzle game. Majesty 2 is a Sim & RTS game. More modern and easier. Less uniqe.