Majestic Nights is an episodic action-adventure game set in an alternate version of the 1980s where the craziest conspiracy theories are considered true. It’s a neon, Miami Vice loving, men in black having, game full of intrigue and some genuinely neat writing and quick pacing.Unfortunately, these things aren’t enough to save Majestic Nights from being nothing more than a mediocre game. It comes down to a matter of style over substance; Majestic Nights has a whole lot of style, but very little substance.
Chapter 1 of Majestic Nights just falls flat, which is a shame because there is so much potential here. The screenshots and trailer easily grab you and make you really excited to jump into what (at the time) looked to be a game based on classic isometric RPGs of days gone by. Unfortunately, what we end up with is a pretty cool story with a neat visual style and a less than stellar gameplay all around.
Gameplay itself consists of you controlling the player and guiding them through a number of stages looking for intel and generally playing the cool 80s spy. At first this all works great as you walk around slowly interacting with in-game objects and NPCs. It all works… Okay, but the game just begs to be played in a more classic point-and-click style of game like the first 2 Fallout games.
Everything falls apart gameplay wise when you enter the combat sections of the game, of which there are a lot of, especially in Chapter 1 (Chapter 0 is a very brief prequel that sort of serves as a tutorial). The games AI is down right idiotic at all times during the game. Majestic Nights offers stealth like elements by allowing you to hide in the dark corners of rooms, but that is hardly necessary as enemies will leave you alone as long as you walk away from combat.
The only time enemies become a real threat to the player is when the game decides that they will be able to see and fire through solid walls and through locked steel doors. I’m a big fan of stealth games and when my player picked up a Katana I was extatic to get on some quiet slice-and-dice action, but I quickly found out that this isn’t necessary, or even that much much. Why make the game take longer by going stealth mode when you can just as easily run in, guns blazing, and take out the entire stage of enemies without even breaking a sweat.
When you die, odds are you won’t, you will have to begin the entire floor/stage over again, but as none of them are really that long you may only be set back ten or so minutes tops. Again, you aren’t going to face much of a challenge in Majestic Nights and the fact that the game (at the time of this writing) is buggy as all hell doesn’t make matters any better. Enemies will walk through objects, get stuck against each other, player controls will occasionally freak-out and not work right, and the ability to shoot from cover only makes shooting much harder than just standing in the open and firing.
The sound fits the game, but it won’t add much to the experience and you won’t be remembering any of the generic tunes. There was a great opportunity here to licence some classic 80s tunes, even some of the lesser known songs of the day would have been great, but instead what we get is generic filler that sounds like what a kid today thinks the 80s sounded like.
Finally, Majestic Nights isn’t that long of a game. I clocked in at just over 3 hours and that’s mostly because I tried to go back and explore as much of the game as possible. The average player will find that a normal chapter will only last a little longer than an hour, maybe an hour and a half, most of which is filled up reading the games dialogue and blasting through unaware enemies.
Majestic Nights has a lot of promise and should really have been something special here on Steam. In the end what we get is a very short, very mediocre, extremely buggy, isometric adventure game that while stylish, falls flat in the gameplay department. If you are really interested in checking the game out you can download a demo for yourself. Majestic Nights will run you $5 bucks for chapter 1, but you could do much better things with the money. I will be checking out the next chapter to see if the game finds its footing, because there is potential here, just not enough right now to warrant a purchase.
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