A very interesting and addictive game, with a great core system that mixes ideas from Master of Magic and HoMM, but sadly it lacks the polish and creativity that made games like HoMM 3 so endlessly fun. Having finished the Cult of Storms campaign, I can say I enjoyed a lot the first half of the game, but around the middle your hero gets ridiculously overpowered while your enemies seem to get infinite troop resources to the point the best (and only) strategy is simply to beeline to the enemies’ main hero and punch it to death so their whole faction dies. And basically all maps play like this at that point. Another issue that prevents it from reaching HoMM3 levels of greatness is how similar the factions are. Despite the game having a bunch of different races, they all share a lot of the same units, and most of the truly unique ones are locked behind late-game buildings that you only really get to use in the later maps, which ironically don’t feel that important either, since you’ll mostly be relying on overpowered heroes at that point. Add to this the fact that the different campaigns share many maps, and there isn’t much reason to play the other campaign paths. The maps themselves are mostly fine, but could have used more variety, at times I felt like the few maps that tried anything different were copy pasted ideas of the HoMM campaigns. Also, the AI really sucks. In most battles, if you let the auto-resolve handle things, you’ll lose way more units than necessary, spellcasting units waste their mana on nothing and units die without doing anything useful. So you’re basically forced to play out every single fight manually, even the easy ones, just to avoid dumb losses. That gets extremely annoying, especially on big maps where enemies will summon endless hordes if you try a turtle approach. Overall this game shows lots of potential, but it feels like it needed more time in the oven.
This game is hilarious, a unique mix of RTS and city-builder with the twist that you can't directly control your units. Instead you gotta bribe heroes to do your bidding by setting rewards, which they will greedily risk their lives for. You build taverns and blacksmith to have the heroes waste their money so you can have some of that money return to you in taxes. The tax collectors are slow and fat and extremely vulnerable to attacks. Your city's growth spawns indestructible sewer entrances that spawn RATMANS from time to time. The heroes themselves act unpredictably and can either be really useful or spend most of the time at the bar. Elves are portrayed as hedonistic and bring all kind of vices to your towns. That's the kind of stuff to expect from Majesty. Levels are very creative, with very different objectives and allow multiple approaches, yet not always the same strategy will work, which keeps the game from getting repetitive. Difficulty also ramps slowly and naturally as missions have tiers, giving you room to naturally improve. Well, with exception of the Tomb of the Dragon King, that level is ridiculous and ironically harder than the actual last level. Everything else though? A great time. As for the expansion, I really couldn't bother playing it all the way through. They clearly went for a more hardcore experience, being much more RTS like, with most levels being harder and demanding much more micromanaging, taking longer, being more scripted and often working more akin puzzles, in which there's one or two specific solutions. Basically they took as inspiration that one level I disliked. And honestly there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but I am just not a big fan of RTS in general and the randomness of this game, like relying on your heroes AI and whatnot makes it even more frustrating.
The OG campaign is very boring, the expansions and some modules are better, but still limited by the engine itself, which both due to its focus on original player creations and its own decisions(like deciding to change from party based to single character adventures) is in many ways is inferior to the 90s Infinity Engine of Baldur's Gate and IWD. Even if it never rises to be truly great, I recommend NWN if you are looking for a more casual RPG experience which you can play to kill some time, or if you have already played all the classics and still want to play more D&D inspired CRPGs.
