Interface

As You Command, My Lord!

Actually, you'd better not hope for being in command when you play Majesty. A king's absolute power reached only as far as his voice did - the rest was influence. Similarly, here in Majesty you don't actually control anything. Sure, you can pick a building and say where it's going to be built, but work won't start right away. Your peasants have little routes that they run - fixing and maintaining buildings - before they start work on your new design. It might take them as long as a few minutes to get started on that guard tower that you needed yesterday. Sometimes, we found ourselves wishing that there was an executioner's block building or something, to make examples of peasants and adventurers showing remarkable stupidity. Regardless, wishful thinking won't get us anywhere.

The town begins to grow

Time to Research

The interface, however, is very well thought-out. Any players with considerable experience in SimCity and WarCraft-type games will have a good feel for the interface, though the details will probably elude them. For such a vast and complicated set of controls, the designers actually managed quite well. Holding your cursor above most buttons give a brief description, and when selecting possible building projects, there's a little question mark to click, which will give you a summary about the building's characteristics.

Place that exploration flag!

Bad news babe =(

Simple, Small

The interface simplifies the game quite a bit. Once you see the manual, you realize just how much there is that you can do. Majesty is quite complex, but yet retains an air of simplicity that's quite unexpected. Basically, should you wish to, you can get in on all the micromanagement you want - even going so far as setting tax routes, and the minimum take before the taxman comes home. However, none of that micromanagement is really necessary. Players can get by perfectly well by simply macromanaging things - which is what the game lends itself most to.

City Guards own Zombies

Planning on some Thieving, milord?

Unfortunately, we had a few gripes with the interface. For one, it tends to use small buttons a great deal. And when we say small, we mean tiny. Just try to tell your taxman to not visit this house. Go right ahead. Ha! You can't - the button is at most 4 pixels by 4 pixels across (ok, so not that bad, but you get the idea.)