Majesty is aiming its wand at the right spot, but it just misses. Excuse the pun.
There are a lot of great things embedded inside of Majesty 2. Its "RTS"/Mini-Micro management (and i stress MINI-MICRO because there is not a lot of management involved. You just have to keep your city from being destroyed by setting up sentries and paying people to guard it, if need be) mixes fun and innovation. Unlike the typical RTS, (ie. Age of Empires, Sins of a Solar Empire, Warcraft, etc...), Majesty 2 does not give you control over any of your subjects. You are just a ruler, or actually a mercenary-hirer i suppose, who creates bounties for guilds to chase after. These bounties then allow the mercenaries to upgrade their equipments through shops that you set up in town. There is also a leveling system that works wonders for the game. As your mercs (short of mercenaries) fight, they gain experience and they level up. The higher the level, the higher the hit points, and the more the health. They also get an upgrade in outer equipments (much like in an rpd) , and this makes them look so much cooler! This aspect of the game allowed me, personally, to enjoy running around and killing enemy spawn zones.
However, this leveling system is also a little bit frustrating. As the clock rolls on (yes, there is a clock, it sends enemies to your city), stronger enemies will come to your settlement and try to tear things up. Sometimes, there are heavy-hitters (ie. golems, dragons, vampires), and they can be a huge problem. You absolutely need level 10++ in order to kill these monsters, and that leaves the mercs that have just been spawned for slaughter. In adittion, due to the lack of control, your mercs do not follow your orders in dire situations (especially when 3 dragons and 2 golems have entered your city with 2500 to 3000 life points per monster), and they'll just wander about looking for things to do. So this means that while half of your city is being torn up, you'll see a bunch of people just strolling about on the bottom half. The difficulty is also unbalanced. As you proceed to higher zones, you'll often fluctuate between an easy level and a hard level. There is no definite consistency to how hard a level gets. You can die multiple times on a supposedly easy level to only sweep through the next, and "harder", one with ease. The content of this game is also a little bit narrow. There are not a lot of character choices and this game can be very sexist. For example, the rogue guild is only made up of females and the warrior guild is only made up of males. The character models also do not change except for level ups, which are pretty sweet. It's always nice to see a warrior go from armorless to fully-cladded knight.
However, despite all the faults that i've found and despite all my complaints, i spent more than ten hours on this game, more than Batman: Arkham Asylum, which i got on the same day. I love Majesty 2, and it pains me to give this game only an 8. But that score does it so much more justice than the ones that demanding gamers make these days (repetetive, boring, etc...). I love this game for its simplicity and entertainment.
It's nice to see a developer that just focuses on the fun ratther than the complexity of a game.