Majesty 2 Collection Review
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IntroductionThe Majesty 2 Collection was released in April of last year. It contains Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim, its three expansion packs Kingmaker, Battles of Ardania, and Monster Kingdom, plus assorted DLC content, including an extra tier of weapons and armor for your heroes, themes for your kingdom buildings, and an ice mage temple. I reviewed Majesty 2 when it came out in 2009, so I'll only touch on it here, and I'll mostly concentrate on what you get in the three expansion packs, and if the bundle is a worthwhile purchase.
Majesty 2
Both Majesty (released in 2000) and Majesty 2 are roughly the same game. You build up a fantasy kingdom, you populate it with heroes, and you defeat your enemies. However, unlike other real-time strategy games of the same nature, you're not given complete control over your heroes. Instead, you have to put out attack, defend, and explore flags -- and attach money to them -- to encourage your heroes to do what you want.
The main difference between the two games is that the heroes in Majesty wander around and do their own thing, sometimes to the detriment of your kingdom, while in Majesty 2 they just hang out in your kingdom (making it much easier to defend) and only venture out when you place flags. This change removes a lot of the uniqueness of Majesty and turns Majesty 2 into a much more typical real-time strategy game.
The 16-mission campaign that comes with Majesty 2 tells of your ascent to the throne after the king (a long-distant relative) is killed by a powerful demon. You then spend most of your time collecting allies, which turn into heroes that you can recruit, and artifacts, which give you powerful bonuses, before finally confronting the demon and becoming king.
Kingmaker
Kingmaker comes with an 8-mission campaign where you take on Grum-Gog, the God of Plague. Goblins, the disciples of Grum-Gog, are your main enemy in the campaign, and they get their own set of kingdom buildings (including houses for gnomes, who can build and repair) but no actual hero units. During the course of the campaign, you investigate why Grum-Gog is provoking you, you develop the antidote to a nasty goblin poison, and you eventually defeat Grum-Gog's powerful avatar.
Along with the campaign, developer Ino-Co also released two things of interest at about the same time (in patches). The first is a "randomize" option, which randomizes the locations of monster lairs, trading post sites, and temple sites, and which drastically affects the difficulty of the missions. This change is available in all of the missions in the collection, not just Kingmaker, and it makes Majesty 2 play a little more like the original Majesty, where the missions were always randomized.
The second addition is a mission editor, which allows fans to create their own missions, complete with scripted events and triggers. Unfortunately, from what I can tell the editor never caught on (it seems as though most people couldn't figure out how to use it), and so you won't find a lot of fan-made missions.
