Published 24/03/2026

Majesty Gold

There are only a handful of games that I would say defined my taste in video games going forward. My love of 3D platformers was born from Super Mario 64, my addiction to turn-based strategies Fire Emblem, and zealot-like adherence to Metroidvanias from Metroid: Zero Mission. But when it comes to RTS games? It was just Majesty. It is always just Majesty. An RTS like no other, Majesty places you directly in control of the realm as it’s sole ruler, challenging you to brave the dangers of the realm and build an economy and army of heroes from the ground up… with the caveat that you have no direct control over the denizens of your nation! There truly is nothing like it, but despite a golden, shining core, Majesty is a victim of its own uniqueness.

Majesty is the kind of game that blows me away for a lot of reasons. One of those is simply because there’s nothing like it, but it’s equally crazy that nothing has come out since that remotely blends the classic RTS strategy game with the chiller, more cerebral city builder. Sure, there was Majesty 2, but we don’t talk about Majesty 2 that much for some very good reasons.

But saying that Majesty marries the genres of the RTS with the City Builder sounds a little redundant - after all, building up your settlements is a huge part of any RTS, from Starcraft to Warcraft to Age of Empires. Majesty is different, and very, very unique in a key way. You see, whilst a lot of RTS ostensibly place you in the role of an overseer like character, literally commanding troops from above, Majesty explicitly, from start to finish, puts you in the role of the King of your subjects, expanding the realm, and protecting all from the forces of evil - all whilst building a proper, psuedo-realistic economy to underpin your efforts.

Yeah, ain’t nothing like Majesty.

King’s Eye View

But what does that all exactly mean? Well, the most important element is that you have no actual control over the individuals who run your kingdom. You can build structures, perform upgrades, and recruit heroes, but you can’t control the builders, the tax collectors, and especially not those heroes. After all, they’re more akin to freelancers affiliated with your kingdom; they’ve got their own desires, their own behaviours and little adventures to go to, and so you’ll have to cough up the coin to actually get them - and arm them - to do what you want.

Any given map in Majesty is populated with all manner of old-school fantasy monsters - and their lairs. You’ll 100% need heroes to keep you alive, and for you to strike out and make safe the lands between. The only real way you can directly influence your heroes is by double clicking on a location or particular enemy, and putting a bounty on them. When it comes to defending your town, you normally can just leave it to your heroes’ AI to keep you safe, but how about that enemy lair halfway across the map? Well, a nice little bounty of 1000 gold will send half your roster scrambling for a piece of the pie.

But where do you get gold from? Rather than earning resources from specific locations, like in most RTS, Majesty has a kind of in-built economy loop. Heroes will generally earn and generate gold by wandering and killing across the world, and so you’ll need to build marketplaces and blacksmiths, along with other, similar buildings, for them to purchase supplies and weapons for further journeys. That money is then stored within these buildings, before a town tax collector will come from your castle and collect the money, adding it back to your stockpile and allowing you to spend more money on heroes, upgrades, and other typical RTS progression. Gold can also be spent to cast spells unavailable to your heroes, exclusive to you, the ruler, unlocked by building certain structures associated with the spells. These can range from devastating offensive spells to potent buffs and heals - or even resurrections - to specific units, but using more than a few will evaporate your gold reserves in an instant, making using them a painful balance best suited for all-in strategies, or emergency defense.

Heroes and Halfwits

With you having no direct control over your units, it leads to pretty much every unit having their own little quirks and foibles. Rangers, whilst not being particularly sturdy or useful in combat, are incredibly important early game units as they’ll freely explore the map without the need for reward flags to entice them. Conversely, Rogues are similarly middling in combat, but are so hungry for coin that they’ll do anything for the smallest bounty, from exploring some random spot on the map to literally burning down their own home if you ask them to. Some will hover close to town, but are so squishy you’ll need to build upgrade shops for them to get their upgrades, pronto - otherwise, you’ll be hit with the same voice lines as various heroes die from a single hit to a high-level monster. The amount of times I’ve heard “I’m melting!” from one of my Wizards attempting to take down a dragon is far too high.

Battles are thus fairly hand-off affairs, with your role normally being throwing down a bounty to take down a particularly devastating foe, or scrambling to use your spells to bail out your struggling heroes. Despite this hands-off design, these battles are no less dramatic; fights with boss monsters could involve up to a dozen of your heroes working together to win, and the sea of voice lines of heroes charging, fighting and dying is almost euphoric in nature.

The fact you don’t directly control your heroes does make Majesty one of the most immersive RTS games ever, but it does lead to the occasional, inherent, bit of frustration. Sometimes, your heroes just don’t want to behave, ignoring critical structures coming under attack and refusing to deal with imminent disaster. Other times, they’ll be far *too* gung-ho; the weakest of units will throw themselves at the most dangerous of foes, refusing to back off even as certain death fills their vision (“I’m melting!!!”). It’s a hard thing to criticize - it’s a really unique, really cool feature, but the very nature of the beast means it can doom a level just by luck. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles, I suppose - and considering Majesty’s age, the fact it works as well as it does is pretty damn satisfying.

I have a lot of love for city builders (even if I’m terrible at them), so it’s a really lovely feeling to slowly craft out your little settlement across any given level. Not only will you be building inns, marketplaces, and guilds for heroes, automatically houses will spawn as your population grows, feeding your tax collectors. But at the same time, sewer systems will spawn due to the strain your kingdom places on the environment, spawning rats and Ratman-based enemies behind your defense lines. Hell, if you lose enough heroes - and in some of the hardest levels, this WILL happen - entire graveyards will appear that’ll spawn pretty decent hordes of undead to threaten your weakened homeland, further penalising the wandering of your heroes.

Your choice of buildings also affects what heroes you can recruit - for example, each of the non-human races, Elves, Gnomes, and Dwarves, will refuse to join a settlement with any of the others. There’s also a myriad of magical temples you can build, each with their own suite of spells and units to recruit, but you can typically only build any two or three of them, as they’ll lock out their ‘competitors’ upon being built. Whilst there are 100% certain unit types that are easily worth using over their competition - like the necromantic Temple of Krypta which spawns hordes of skeletons across the map, or the immortal, paladin-spawning Temple to Dauros - but many quests will outright ban you from using certain factions, so there’s plenty reason to play around with everyone and find which units you prefer.

There’s a lot of little unique abilities and benefits to using certain heroes or building certain buildings beyond just their functional use, but sometimes their benefits aren’t quite clear. Reading the manual helps, but Majesty’s in-game tutorialization leaves a bit to be desired. You’ll learn plenty by checking the tooltips on each building, but there’s basic stuff like the behaviors of certain units, or even how money making works. Early levels will put you in areas with little dangers and the objective of making money or building a high tier structure, but actually learning how to make that money - marketplaces, inns, and all that - doesn’t click right away without early knowledge.

North And South, Simple and Complex, Safe and Frustrating

Whilst you can do free-build, scenarioless games, the bulk of Majesty’s gameplay lies in its several dozen single-player quests. The game doesn’t really have an overarching story, as rather each quest depicts part of your kingdom's expansion across the land, encountering new dangers and challenges with each new horizon - and you’re apparently the ruler to sort it all out! I say challenges, but many of the game’s base levels’ - taking place in the south half of the world map - goals are fairly simplistic and samey. There’s a ton that essentially all boil down to ‘destroy specific, or all, lairs in a map’, or ‘collect an item from this boss monster’. Some will spice up a certain section of the level, like sending a small army of enemies at you from the jump to quickly spur you into action, or facing you off with a powerful boss at the end, but it’s very rare you’ll find something to really stop your in your tracks in the original suite of quests. Really, in the complete Majesty Gold, I feel the base game quests are a great way to get to grips with all of Majesty’s intricacies.

But, even if I loved it as a kid, if I solely played Majesty’s base game today, whilst I’d be tossing superlatives at it until the cows come home, I’d be pretty critical of its general quest design. It’s all just a bit too samey, a little too safe, and nothing to really challenge you *that* much.

Thankfully, we have an entire expansion to fix that little quibble - and put all those skills you’ve learnt to the test.

The Northern Expansion feels like a total shift in quest design as compared to the base game. Whilst I found many of the base game missions fun, but samey, The Northern Expansion is a massive jump in difficulty, level complexity and scenario variance. It’s so intense, it’s clear to me that Majesty’s level design was slightly more safe to ensure as many people as possible stuck with the game’s unorthodox command scheme. For lack of a better term, the Expansion levels are waaaay more catered towards the sickos who REALLY dug this game.

There’s just so much difference within the Expansion. Base under siege, survival-style levels like Clash of Empires or Rise of the Rat King, or ones that totally limit your hero pool to the bleeding edge, like The Scions of Chaos or Legendary Heroes. Everything here is interesting, regardless of its overall quality, which makes me forgive a lot of these quibbles that rear their head. Every level feels unique to one another in the expansion. Cream of the crop is easily The Siege, a map which pits you into an eponymous siege with a full enemy fortress, filled with its own units and fortifications. With the option to win through conquest or strangling their economy via taking out trade caravans, it’s an incredibly unique encounter that didn’t feel overwhelming, but incredibly exciting. Huge pitched battles with tens of units battling out, magic being thrown on both sides and slowly tightening the noose on the enemy base was so, so good.

But as good and unique as many of the scenarios in the Expansion can be, the focus on making them harder through arbitrary restrictions or RNG can make it a massive slog to get through at times. Sometimes levels - especially ones where you need to protect certain buildings - will just suddenly spam a ton of high-level units without warning, turning otherwise engaging levels, like the Valley of the Snakes, into ridiculously frustrating ordeals that require pitch-perfect timing and strategy to pull off. But the big cardinal sin is that a handful of the hardest levels - like Legendary Heroes or the base game’s final level, The Reckoning, are so difficult that simple RNG can doom you from the start. Time limits or restrictions so potent that the fact that an enemy wandered too close to your base from the jump, or a target structure is in the last place you looked, will doom you more severely than any lapse in judgement. Sometimes the game just decides - you lose, and there’s very little you can do to mitigate it.

But I don’t want my frustrations with the game’s alternating simplicity and brutality to make it seem like I dislike this game. I think Majesty is inherently incredible, a true original take on the RTS and City Builder genres, but I think the fact it’s so unique that it was genuinely hard to develop challenging, unique scenarios around. RNG isn’t an issue in the more simplistic base game levels, but in an attempt to make the Expansion harder, stringent restrictions and RNG elements can make certain levels nightmares to attempt, let alone complete.

But where the base game’s levels were, whilst good, safe and consistent, The Northern Expansion faces an opposite problem. A big issue with the game is that it very rarely feels 100% satisfying to nail a level. Stuff like the Siege, Clash of Empires, or Urban Renewel manage to straddle the gap, but everything else swings too far one way or antoher. On the easy end, many of the base game levels become on the side of simplicity. They can sometimes take a while, but no matter your strategy you can normally pull out a win by recruiting a lot of heroes and earning a lot of gold to spam magic. Outside of levels where you have time limits or very specific objectives - like Deal With A Devil, focussed around earning money, fast - Majesty’s base game has a ‘one strategy fits all’ kind of design to it. But like I said, the other hand of the scale is far more frustrating - RNG and ambushes can tarnish the charm of these amazing scenarios.

Like an Old Friend

I also want to shout-out the incredibly chill, cozy, and old-school vibe the game has, visually and audibly. It’s cast of units and creatures feel torn from old-school, classic fantasy; the sword and magic toting heroes, the monstrous undead, goblins, dragons and demons… It’s an incredibly comfy experience, helping make even the most stressful stages feel that little bit more easy to tackle. This extends to the soundtrack, too; whilst it’s only got a handful of tracks, the way it slowly ramps up the intensity the further you get into any given mission is fantastic.

On a tangential note, this game shares a lot of its aesthetics, albeit it Majesty having a more fantasy-lean to it, with another of my favorite RTS games, Stronghold. Which, funnily enough, also was a somewhat unique take on the city builder/RTS hybrid. God, we just need weirder RTS games! That’s exactly what a famously hard to get into genre needs! Slower mechanics! City building elements!

Which reminds me - Majesty absolutely skimped on having a variety of voice lines for it’s pretty decent variety of units. I joked about the Wizard’s death lines earlier, but after just a few hours in the game, you’ll have so many repeated voice lines - many of them death quotes - seared into your brain. “I joined… the wild spirits”, “Leave my gold… alone…” and “At last!!!” have entered my autistic vocabulary against my will. Shout out to the fruitiest Tax Collectors you’ll ever heard, to the point they sound like cast members of the Steel Mill scene from The Simpsons. “More gold, your majesty!”

I think in overall quality, Majesty Gold is a bit of a mixed bag. Perpetually, the unique take on blending the RTS and City Builder genres is laudable, something I’d never seen before when I played for a kid, and something I’ve never really seen since. Learning to play around the behaviours of the AI-fueled heroes, and slowly building little, functioning, settlements is wonderful. But a game like this has a foundation built on its scenarios, and here, I’m a little more mixed. The base game perfectly embodies the gameplay systems, but at the cost of being a little too easy, and the quests being a little too similar. Conversely, the Northern Expansion has a much higher level of difficulty and uniqueness, but sometimes the RNG and ambush tactics makes the difficulty too much to cope with. Though, the diamonds that shine through shine *hard*. There’s very little like Majesty, and that alone makes it something very special to me, and thus no matter its flaws… man, what else can I say? Just go play it, you won’t regret it a bit.