Nine years ago a lesser-known title was released called Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim. It was a unique strategy title released amongst a sea of Star Craft clones. It was a different kind of game that was less about micro-managing a large army by directly telling them what to do, and more about building your city and making effective use of your gold to ensure that your heroes were as strong as possible. Motivating them was done via reward flags that gave them gold for completing certain tasks. You could build them a blacksmith to upgrade their gear, a market place so they could buy health potions, and there were even rival heroes of whom you had to pick. If you wanted Dwarves then you would have to give-up the ability to bring Elves or Gnomes into your city. There were also rival temples, allowing you to either recruit healing priests, or skeleton-summoning necromancers among other priest types. The game was a cult hit with it's uniqueness being one of the favored things by its fans, but it seems that Majesty did copy one aspect of Star Craft, and that's its sequel release. After nearly a decade's wait, we finally have Majesty 2.
Majesty 2 plays virtually identically to its predecessor, but with a few noticeable changes. Where in the first Majesty you could micro your tax collector's route by removing certain buildings from his collection path, in this game you can only modify how much gold is needed before your tax collector sets out. The game also removed your ability to manually destroy one of your own buildings, a move to counter players from making cheaper buildings at the edge of their exploration zone and destroying them to creep along the map as an exploration method. Also gone is the rival dynamic of the races and temples. You can bring both Elves and Dwarves into your kingdom (Gnomes are strangely missing), and you can build any combination of Temples you want. The game still makes it a point to tell you who doesn't like who, but there seems to be no penalty for ignoring those warnings.
There are certainly some refreshing changes though. For one, you can now assign a defense flag to a friendly hero or building. This counters having to put attack flags on multiple enemies who are all attacking a single target. Instead, you can assign that target to be defended and your heroes will react by attacking anything threatening the defend target. Another nice change is that Rogues are no longer a redundant third arrow-shooting class, instead being tooled as dagger-wielding melee combatants who can stun their opponent. Temple classes have had their power balanced a little by restricting where they can be build, now you need to track down some hallowed ground before you can recruit the powerful Paladins or vicious Blade Masters. Majesty 2 also seems to have brought its own quirky sense of humor, mostly delivered through your adviser who gives the mission briefings with an uncanny Sean Connery impersonation, but it isn't such an over-bearing humor that you feel forced to laugh at it if you'd rather ignore it.
The game isn't without it's flaws, however. The game's balance seems a little off, in that some missions will be a cake walk, and then the next one will be hair-pullingly frustrating. Part of this is a lack of balance in the heroes, in that using certain heroes will make the game a lot easier, meanwhile all the other heroes can be easily ignored. It's a unique synergy between my first two philosophies behind game design, the first faltered, and it snagged the other while it tumbled down. The lack of a freeplay option means your restricted to either the campaign missions or the few single maps available. Another lacking feature from the first game is the presence of borders when placing a new building to help you see where you can and cannot place your new building, instead you just have waver around the area you want to build and wait for the red highlight to go away as you seek the ideal spot.
Over-all though, Majesty 2 is an enjoyable game, especially for those RTS fans who are seeking something outside of the norm. This isn't just another Star Craft clone claiming to do something, this is a completely different kind of Strategy title that almost plays closer to Sim City than to most other common RTS titles.
Showing posts with label Reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reviews. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Monday, August 24, 2009
Review: BlazBlue
Another day, another fighter. That's what I think about most Fighting Game releases. Seems that Fighting Games these days basically fall under one of two categories: The Streetfighter "everyone's move is down-to-toward punch" styled fighters that feature a generic charge meter for your super moves, and the occasional game that wants to be Soul Calibur. BlazBlue falls under the former category. The majority of characters have the same "down-towards" input commands, and the characters all have a Heat Gauge that they can charge in order to unleash they're special attacks. I don't think I could yawn long enough to emphasize how many fighting games use that same style.
But enough with first impressions of the game. Unlike most fighters of the Street Fighter model, BlazBlue has an amazing amount of depth. The first of which is the "Drive" attacks you can use. Doing away with the boring (and clunky on a 4-button-faced controller) system of having 3 varying strengths for punches and kicks, BlazBlue simply gives you 4 buttons to worry about. Weak, Medium, Strong, and Drive. The Drive button works like any other attack button, except that it has a completely different property for every character. One character can use health-draining attacks, one can magnetize his opponents to grab them from across the screen, and one character's Drive is an ability that my friends and I have dubbed "Push the green Skittle, get a combo".
Unlike most fighters where how fast and how hard your character hits are just about the only variance between two characters, the Drive attacks in BlazBlue essentially mean that both players are effectively playing two completely different games with the only common ground being that the goal in both games is "deplete your opponent's health bar". So you'll have a match where one player is controlling the wind to assist with attacks (or deter the other's), and the other is more focused on controlling the screen by filling it with bugs and other obsticals that need to be dodged around in order to attack him.
If there was any reason for someone to not buy this game, I would have to say that it has very fast-paced combat that might be unfriendly towards someone new to the fighting genre. If you're new to fighting games and playing this against people more familiar with the genre, you're likely to have a much harder time figuring-out how everything works. So if you want more of a "Fighting Games 101" course, there are better options out there, but you'll definately want to come back and pick this one up once you have the hang of things.
My only other gripe with the game is the Story Mode. Now, unlike most fighters, this game actually has a fairly interesting story, but that isn't the gripe. The way the story mode is set-up is you pick a character and then play through his/her side of the story. You get in a few fights, you pick a few branching paths, and of course there's different endings depending on your choices. To complete each story, you need to work your way through having done 100% of that character's story. This means viewing all of the sequences... including the losing ones. So if you aren't careful, it tends to lead to situations where you have 2% left to go, and you could swear you've already lost to everyone, but now you have to play it through multiple times to lose to everyone again just to make sure. It comes-off as pointless busy-work when you consider that there's rarely anything of interest to be seen in the losing sequences.
To sum it all up though, BlazBlue is a very fun, and very well-balanced fighting game. There are probably about a dozen other things that I could rant about that attribute to the game's greatness, but at the same time I feel the review is long enough as-is. If you're a fan of the fighting genre (especially 2D fighters), then there's no excuse for not playing this game. If you've never played fighters but are looking to get into them, don't forget to come back and pick this one up once you think you can keep-up with more fast-paced combat. BlazBlue is not a game to be missed.
But enough with first impressions of the game. Unlike most fighters of the Street Fighter model, BlazBlue has an amazing amount of depth. The first of which is the "Drive" attacks you can use. Doing away with the boring (and clunky on a 4-button-faced controller) system of having 3 varying strengths for punches and kicks, BlazBlue simply gives you 4 buttons to worry about. Weak, Medium, Strong, and Drive. The Drive button works like any other attack button, except that it has a completely different property for every character. One character can use health-draining attacks, one can magnetize his opponents to grab them from across the screen, and one character's Drive is an ability that my friends and I have dubbed "Push the green Skittle, get a combo".
Unlike most fighters where how fast and how hard your character hits are just about the only variance between two characters, the Drive attacks in BlazBlue essentially mean that both players are effectively playing two completely different games with the only common ground being that the goal in both games is "deplete your opponent's health bar". So you'll have a match where one player is controlling the wind to assist with attacks (or deter the other's), and the other is more focused on controlling the screen by filling it with bugs and other obsticals that need to be dodged around in order to attack him.
If there was any reason for someone to not buy this game, I would have to say that it has very fast-paced combat that might be unfriendly towards someone new to the fighting genre. If you're new to fighting games and playing this against people more familiar with the genre, you're likely to have a much harder time figuring-out how everything works. So if you want more of a "Fighting Games 101" course, there are better options out there, but you'll definately want to come back and pick this one up once you have the hang of things.
My only other gripe with the game is the Story Mode. Now, unlike most fighters, this game actually has a fairly interesting story, but that isn't the gripe. The way the story mode is set-up is you pick a character and then play through his/her side of the story. You get in a few fights, you pick a few branching paths, and of course there's different endings depending on your choices. To complete each story, you need to work your way through having done 100% of that character's story. This means viewing all of the sequences... including the losing ones. So if you aren't careful, it tends to lead to situations where you have 2% left to go, and you could swear you've already lost to everyone, but now you have to play it through multiple times to lose to everyone again just to make sure. It comes-off as pointless busy-work when you consider that there's rarely anything of interest to be seen in the losing sequences.
To sum it all up though, BlazBlue is a very fun, and very well-balanced fighting game. There are probably about a dozen other things that I could rant about that attribute to the game's greatness, but at the same time I feel the review is long enough as-is. If you're a fan of the fighting genre (especially 2D fighters), then there's no excuse for not playing this game. If you've never played fighters but are looking to get into them, don't forget to come back and pick this one up once you think you can keep-up with more fast-paced combat. BlazBlue is not a game to be missed.
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