The official title of this game is “Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim.”

But it is categorized under the RTS genre.
Then which one is it, you ask?

It’s actually little bit of both.

The player gets to run a fantasy kingdom called Ardania using some RTS fundamentals. However, the player does not have control over each unit that has been created. Sounds interesting enough?

If you love the fantasy kingdom themed games, you’re probably interested already. But for Sim and/or RTS fans, we can’t say for sure that you’ll like the game, because it diverges a bit from the traditional RTS or Sim genre. Let us explain.

The goal in this game is to run a successful kingdom; slaying demons while running a successful economy. And like many RTS games, it’ll let the player build and upgrade the buildings necessary to protect the land or enrich the economy. But as we told you before, that’s going to be as far as your control extends; trained units from the buildings you’ve built have their own free will. You can’t make them go here or there. So how do you control them? You give them a “quest” to lure them to do what you want.

Let’s look at an RPG or MMORPG as an example. The objectives and stories are usually progressed through chains of quests, and when the player finishes a quest, he or she is rewarded. Majesty 2 uses this concept, but this time, you’ll be the one giving people the quest, and designating the reward in gold. For instance, if you see a bear running around killing peasants, how do you get rid of them? You flag the bear with a “attack and kill” quest, then set the price of the reward. If you set the reward too low, no one might take on the quest to kill the bear. But if you set the right amount of gold as the reward, perhaps a few warriors and rangers might be interested. The decision of which units participate in the quests are for the AI to decide.

Thankfully, the AI is pretty smart in this game. Of course, the AI can’t read your mind all the time, but this is where the “sim” kicks in. If you were able to control each unit, then it’ll just be another RTS. But getting involved indirectly makes you feel like you’re managing a kingdom as a whole, not just the military.

To make it all happen under your control, you need gold, lots of gold. And this is where the economy system kicks in. How do you make money? You collect taxes from the marketplace, inn, blacksmith and from everyone that lives on your land. You indirectly sell items by making a marketplace, and let them do research of necessary items such as potions or magical accessories that can boost your hero’s abilities. And when you build guilds such as a Warriors Guild or a Rangers Guild, the trained heroes will voluntarily buy the potions from the marketplace as they prepare for upcoming battles. Brilliant!

It may sound like the player isn’t involved too much in the game, but the game proves otherwise. Because the player isn’t in direct control, there may be more micromanagement that needs to be done. Not that it’s going to drive you nuts, but with no direct interaction between the player and the units, players are forced to do extra stuff (like flagging the quests) to keep it busy. Unless you hate this kind of micromanagement, the experience is more pleasant than expected. We really felt like a king running a kingdom, instead of a military commander giving orders to everyone. As far as getting the feel for the controls, the learning curve isn’t too steep at all; if the you invest a good 30 minutes into the tutorial, you won’t have much problem later in the game.

The storyline is very well written. You’ll never get bored thanks to the clever lines from your Royal Adviser, explaining to you why the dragon was named a certain way; “The dragon with blue and gold wings-you know, the one that ate Ted.” And the voice acting is on par with the script. The music is nothing less than a fit, though you’re not gonna be hearing a diverse set of tracks after hours of gameplay. But nonetheless, overall audio quality is great.

The graphics and design is also nothing to complain about. It doesn’t have the latest ‘zOMG SO SHINY WITH AWESOME PHYSICS ENGINE’ graphics, but it runs very smoothly on mid-level PCs, which means that you don’t have to empty your pockets out for video cards to enjoy this game. And yes, there’s also multiplayer modes where you can compete online with people on the internet, or you can choose LAN if you want to play this at a LAN party or with your family members and friends at the same house.

This game is definitely fun, but we don’t know if this is for everyone. Even though I enjoyed it so much, later on you feel like it’s a bit repetitive; doing similar mission objectives, just with different names. And I’m not sure if I’m a good RTS gamer or not, but it feels like the game gets pretty hard later. The game will hook you up with a very forgiving difficulty at first, but it’s probably gonna take you just a little bit more than a few days to see the ending to this one.

But these complaints are only my personal wish to want more out of this awesome game. And even if you slightly enjoy this type of game, I’m sure you’ll be satisfied and have a great time with this game. With a good storyline, witty presentation, visual details and audio that successfully creates a middle age fantasy world atmosphere, you won’t be disappointed by Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom.

Our Score: 8.5 /10

RTS, Sim, they’re all good. At least with Majesty 2.

There were many big title announcements today – and yes we love them all – Majesty 2 still excites us as much (or even more).

This Sim+RTS game has a very unique system, by players not controlling each units but helping them by bringing the resources. The game is set to be released on September 18th, 2009. And if you pre-order at GamersGate before then, you’ll also receive a free copy of Majesty GOLD. Sounds like a great deal to us.

We’ll have it reviewed as soon as we get our hands-on the game.

So.. How would we want to classify East India Company?

I personally think that it’s more important for us to identify this game first, before we jump into our review. Defining preview build #2 depends on which angle you’re looking at, and the results from that may give you a different taste.

East India Company has a mix of popular elements from the previously released titles, with RTS + trading system that Sid Meier’s Pirates! fans might be familiar with. Well, at least in writings we as gamers should be familiar with it, but not really. The gaming system in this game is much more complex that it might not be for everyone. If you love simple RTS games, you might not like it, unless you’re willing to give up some time to learn. But if you love micromanagement, this game is a perfect fit.

In the preview version, the tutorial mode was all in text, or at least it was non-interactive to the point where it feels even more like a micromanagement than it has to be. To give it some credit, this is only a preview build so the final version could be very different.

After the player selects the campaign and difficulty, the world map shows up. You can either tell your captains of the ship to travel with automatic routing, or you can manually tell them where to go. Once the ship goes into port, you gain access to the port. If opted for the automatic routing for trading ships, it is much easier. But if you’re into the micromanagement, I suggest entering the city as soon as your captain arrives at port; you’ll see a whole new set of screens showing up. You can manually set trading options, build and upgrade (if the port is under your control) ships and buildings. It feels like a whole different game.

The city view won’t take your breath away, but it’s always fun to watch a city filled with various people going about their respective animations and so on. Nitro Games appoached the game from this angle, lowering textures and adding many NPCs with their own animations, rather than puttig up a few shiny buildings. And the same goes for the battle mode, which was included on the preview version.

The battle mode is somewhat fun and tedious at the same time. With the wind playing a strong variable in the battle system, ships can be either easily controlled or played against you so much that you don’t feel  like you’re controlling the ship very much. And it simulates ship battles too well to the point where arcade-type fun are non-existent. Ships move very slow and you won’t see the results of the battle anytime soon.

But there are also interesting points to the ship battle systems. You start with an RTS mode, which follows the conservative style of RTS games. You can select and command them with your mouse. But the battle system doesn’t stop there; each captain also has special abilities that can be used during the battle, by pressing the number keys (or using mouse click) that correspond to a skill bar that you would commonly see on RPG or MMORPG games. Interesting. And even though you can enjoy the battle in RTS mode, you can also enter the Direct Command Mode, which gives you more control, as if you’re the captain of the ship that you selected. You can steer (though we had some problems), or you can even time when to shoot the cannons. Not bad at all.

Sounds like fun?
Well, it is, if you’re into this type of games. But without a detailed tutorial, it took us a lot of time to reach the point of having fun. And the same voice acting over and over isn’t too compelling either. The graphics might need some final tuning. And even though there are lots of fun elements into this one game, sometimes it feels like they need to harmonize these elements a bit better.

Luckily though, this was a preview version, before the official release, and the games usuall look much better after the finalization process. We (especially me) really look forward to playing the final release version, but at the same time, we really hope that the game gets fine tuned before the release. This game will be very appealing to the trading-sims-with-RTS+RPG-battle-system gaming fans, but also to the general gaming audience who would like to learn to play this type of game.