Multiplayer Game Reviews

Or… Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom Win?
In a market where “real-time strategy” typically floods the brain with images of mindless shootouts or slashfests between opposing armies of sprites, guided by the clickhappy fingers of an over-caffeinated teenager, Majesty 2 finally gives that index finger some room to breathe. Instead, it keeps things interesting by forcing you to think out your plans ahead of time, employing a method of strategy that actually does the word justice. The game is a remake of the well received classic released in 2000 that spawned an expansion and reasonably good scores from most gaming review sites at the time. In Majesty, you play the role of the ruler of a realm, able to dictate the construction of your city, what upgrades, items, and spells to research, and to recruit your heroes from a variety of different structures. This may all sound familiar, as it’s the standard fare for an RTS these days, but what makes it so unique is that your heroes aren’t mindless zombies, beholden to your every whim. You need to give them an incentive, and they have a mind of their own. Line their pockets with cash by setting objective markers and allocating gold to those markers, and they’ll do as you ask. But if they feel they’re being short-changed, they’ll do little more than sit around at the tavern drinking beer or go home and take a nap until you raise the price. Well…what did you expect? Nobody works for free. That said, let’s get down to business. This review will be broken down into 3 seperate sections, the multiplayer analysis, the technical quality analysis and gameplay analysis, followed by the overall review rating.

Multiplayer Review
Majesty 2 uses gamespy to host its games, and it’s all accessible directly from the multiplayer option in-game. I spent about three hours playing through multiplayer games before sitting down to write up this review, and I’ve come to the conclusion that while the concept is sound, there are some hurdles in the way that are keeping it from truly shining like it could.
-Firstly, the maps are only designed for 1v1, 2v1, or 2v2 play, and the game seems to have a hard time shouldering the load of the 2v2 games. The 1v1 and 2v1 games ran like a charm, but having tried several times to get into a 2v2, I found that more often than not someone would lag out and the game would drop all the players back into the server lobby before the game even started.
-Secondly, it was a little difficult to get a game going. At any given time there were about 20 game hosts running, but at least 50% of those were password locked 1v1’s. So unless you know someone who also has the game and wants to give it a go, there is a few minute game of “sit-and-wait” before anything becomes available. Players were generally receptive of requests in the chat box to start one though, more than likely due to the fact that Majesty 2 is way more fun than Sit-and-Wait.
-Once in a game though, it plays just like the single player version, except you have a human opponent facing you down. So, while both of you contend with the npc baddies that want you dead, you also have to worry about what the other player is doing. On top of that, the game is balanced well enough that neither side makes any tremendous gains over the other too early in the game unless you spend your generous starting funds really poorly. This makes for strong player-vs-player and player-vs-environment gameplay even in the multiplayer sector, something that’s either one way or the other, but never quite both, with all the other RTS games out there.
-Multiplayer games were generally enjoyable, and only truly frustrating when my own noobish decisions led to me being stomped by the AI instead of the enemy player. Overall, the multiplayer in Majesty 2 is an enjoyable and unique experience. Hopefully good reviews and word of mouth will boost game sales and the population trying to get together for a game on Majesty 2 will increase, allaying half of my concerns over its functionality being a low host count. Aside from that, Paradox needs to get a patch out as soon as possible to fix the consistent drop issues being had with the 2v2.

Technical Quality Review
The game isn’t tremendously advanced in the graphical department, but it still manages to be very pleasing to the eye, and has a unique charm to it that takes you back to an almost “shrek-like” fairy tale world. It works well for the game, and coupled with equally fitting sound and an appropriately chosen musical score, there isn’t really anything bad to be said for the games audiovisual design. However, the interface and controls would occasionally conflict with each other, in that I wasn’t always sure if I had deselected something or not because of a lingering window at the bottom of the screen. For the most part though, the game works well in the technical deparment. It’s well put together and the room for improvement comes in the realm of minor interface changes or control tweaks.

Gameplay Review
The game proves itself to be a unique concept among the evergrowing list of copy/pasted RTS formulas. The story is well done and plays out in humorous, fairy tale fashion, as its predecessor did. Each map has different goals, tasks or handicaps and adds to the experience by including these variations to the game. The gameplay doesn’t have that smack of “I feel like I’ve done this a thousand times before”, and the multiplayer is enjoyable, challenging, and comes with a ranking system to reward you for your victories against a ladder of the other players. Generally, it’s a game that doesn’t feel like it’s going to get old fast, and I’ll probably find myself in the future saying “I wish more games tried to be more focused on fun like Majesty”, then dropping into a tirade about companies placing graphical quality over the fun factor.

So, I say…

[Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim]
Gameplay:   Technical:   Multiplayer:	Overall, it’s a pleasing audiovisual experience that’s got the right combination of fun factor and technical quality. Multiplayer, at launch, suffers from issues with lagouts and about 2 dozen consistent hosts, but hopefully both of these issues will work themselves out soon.

CHECK BACK SOON! There are several games being released for the Xbox360 in the next couple of days that have a multiplayer focus to them, and I’ll be reviewing one of them (likely the one I have the easiest time getting my hands on for an evening). I don’t want to choose one specifically right now because there are several good prospects, but check back next Saturday for another review.
Most likely candidates are Halo 3:ODST, and Zombie Apocalypse.

~Lucjan