Majesty Gold HD Reviews

Great game , Great OST . Surely one of the best!

full text didn't fit https://milkandhate.wordpress.com/2025/07/14/majesty-gold-hd/ It’s a take on the Dungeon Keeper formula, I.E. a city-builder in a hostile territory with indirect control. You pay in gold to use spells and put down flags for your units to visit. The economy runs on couriers hauling gold between the source and the treasury. Warriors use the facilities, produce GDP, eat in diners sleep at homes, and gain levels. It even wants to be a comedy. It takes place in the overworld, so the dungeon-planning aspect is lost. There’s no direct control spell, so you really have to hope your artificial idiots would do something useful. And the game intentionally adds a lot of distractions for the goons. The campaign doesn’t really feature skirmish PvP against bots maps. And those choices influenced the whole design paradigm of the game. You have your village in the centre, the randomized map is filled with monster camps that spawn waves of enemies attacking your home, have fun. I decided to call this overall style of design of combat\survival city\base-builders BVDWOL. Build Village Defeat Waves Or Lairs. You have your castle that you can upgrade twice to advance the tech level. Each level also increases the number of builders, tax collectors and guards. You buy the foundations and the builders work towards them to build the building. The price increases the more buildings you have, but it’s not that often that you need duplicates. Only the additional markets are obviously useful since they generate cash. You have a selection of economic and service buildings, and guilds. Guardhouses shoot arrows and house guards, economic buildings generate tax money and sell upgrades for warriors. Guilds offer 2-6 warriors for hire. So if you want eight archer you need a second guild, but that is rarely necessary. There’s no dedicated lair area, so the warriors just build houses wherever, obstructing your city-planning. And the warriors have different cravings, and some of them just outright steal from you. But those too have their use. On top of those randomized houses each city generates severs filled with skaven, and trolls spawning out of nowhere. They are kinda annoying at first, but past the early games they are just free punching bags for heroes to gain XP and cash to spend on services and be taxed. The game has decent design. Many buildings have different active abilities and there are synergies between them, like using market day, and then cashing out with thieves guild. Many of the magic guilds are mutually exclusive, with three distinct paths overall. You can hope that tanks and healers will work together picking those two temples. Or you can hope that you can flood the map with summons and glass cannons by picking the necromancers and naturasts. At tier three you can pick between speed god or fire god. The third path is the god of might who offers only one spell — berserking speeding up a lot of the warriors. Picking this god locks out the rest, but the temples are cheaper and house six warriors each. They also like to work together with the archers, and they seek enemy lairs outside the city limits by themselves. The additional layer is a choice of migrants who all are mutually exclusive. Dwarves guild comes with four towers, and offers cheap and strong tower blueprint. Gnomes are limited in number and mostly useless in combat, but they are cheap and build their additional guilds for free. They are good for maintenance and fast building. The final choice is the elves, they significantly boost the market income, allowing you to build more than five buildings. As the “downside” they also start to spread public houses and casinos that distract non-paladin warriors. The magic spells are not learned or researched. Tier 2 magic guilds come with three spells, each unlocked with a cash upgrade. Tier 3 guilds come with two spells each. The wizard tower does not conflict with any of the temples and has six spells. But they work only in the range of the tower, which can be extended by chaining smaller cheaper towers. It’s a very small game gameplay-wise, but it has plenty of maps. There’s no real tutorial, despite the game calling the “first” map one.It doesn’t teach anything and the game never explains what the spells do. And then you see almost all the mechanics in the first map, and there’s not much else to the game. The maps differ in what they take away, not in what they add. Like play this one with no wizards, or finish this one while being constantly assaulted, etc. Since they are randomly generated inside the set of rules, there’s nothing to look at either. Yet, each Dungeon Keeper map was very distinct. There’s no story in the campaign. Only some disconnected plots for the individual maps. And all are narrated by a parody of Sean Connery, and that does get old. There’s really no progression in the game, not mechanical, not in the story. The separate missions are marked as “beginner”, “advanced”, or “expert”. But that means nothing. Some expert maps are face-rolled if you guessed the correct tactic from the start. Some advanced maps are super hard in execution even when you know what to do. And then The Northern Expansion missions break this denomination entirely. Even the “beginner” northern maps are harder than normal “expert” ones. The gameplay is very simple and minimal, but it’s all RNG. So every timed mission is very hard. You offer 5000 gold, and no one goes to attack the flag, while the time is running out, just because they are not in the mood. The final mission showcases the problems of the whole game. It’s all artificial and pure RNG. Is the cyclops spawned next to the warrior or the wizard? Is the front of the castle cluttered, or free to plop a market? Will the scouts find elves first, or the stupid temples? Will enemies go from the elf side or not? Will enemies target hovels, or markets, or guilds? Most of the missions are so simple, that you will get lucky if not on the first try, then on the second. But the last fight is just bad. Save\load, restart, and look at RNG until you are lucky several times in a row. And don’t forget, you have to turn off repairs for the remote temples, or everything will fall apart. Even for what it is, the GUI is not good for no reason. It wastes a lot of space on useless cameras, like absolutely useless cameras. And you have to press unnecessary buttons all the time. They could’ve had persistent list of buildings, a much smaller panel for flags, and a persistent research panel for every building. There’s no place to see all non-full guilds. It’s all play by ear, memorize the death scream and replenish the guilds. Even when you open the research window it gets collapsed on building upgrade. Every time you win one level, it kicks you out to the main menu, and each time it asks you to input your name again. Why. [...] This game is known to elderly advanced games players. It’s was not really copied, remaining more unique than less. And it’s probably the first game in the non-existing genre. (Which i call BVDWOL) Despite being primitive, it was plenty popular at one time. But the thing is, after the map pack it never had sequels or clones. Majesty 2 was done nine years later by a russian studio, when the original studio was no more. Almost every game in the genre comes with a different set of mechanics taken from different genres. And even then, when 1C with Paradox decided to monetize nostalgia, and bought the ancient dead IP, they dropped the sequel and used it as a social experiment, to see just how much horse armour people are ready to buy. After which they didn’t let the IP go, but never made Majesty 3, instead using the setting for two 4X games, one tower defence, and one Dungeon Keeper clone, going full circle. And there there were none. Why would you need a cut-down Dungeon Keeper with newer graphics, when you have the superior original?

There is nothing like this game. It is one of the best for that reason. And id love someone to make something like this.

Honestly, this feels exactly like when I first had the game and put the CD in to play. It's such a great little game. Some strategy, some comedy, but overall a nice game to play and enjoy! I highly recommend this for fun laid back enjoyment.