I don't know how many people have played the original Majesty. It seems that news of its sequel brought all sorts of people out of the woodwork to talk about how much they loved the first, so it might have been pretty popular. I loved it for certain, though I never had much luck beating the missions in its expansion. I'm considering going back to it in the near future to see if I can't improve my record - and this is as much because I bought the sequel as it is despite it.
For those who aren't familiar and who haven't read any of the previews of this sequel, Majesty 2 is a fantasy RTS with a twist - you don't control any of your units. Instead, think of Majesty like a city-building sim like Caesar or maybe SimCity, except instead of dealing with issues of providing your citizens with services, you're dealing with issues of massive waves of monsters attacking your palace. You build guilds to produce heroes of various types that serve various roles and build economic structures to make sure your tax revenue keeps coming in. That tax revenue is of course used to hire more heroes and more economic structures, but it's also important because you need to place a reward for the simple quests you set your heroes on. The entire presentation is only semi-serious at best, with your advisor (his voice-actor returning from the original Majesty) frequently providing laughs during your simple text mission briefings.
At times, your heroes can feel lazy, sitting in their homes when you need their help, or dimwitted, taking on fights they can't win simply because they have enough healing potions to drag it out. This is particularly the case in the game's more difficult missions, where certain boss characters have the power to trash many classes of hero in a single hit. I particularly had a problem where any character who I resurrected on the field (possible via a high level spell) would not run back home to restock, but would instead run straight back into the battle that killed them originally. Overall, though, through the bulk of the time spent playing the game, the mechanic is fun and satisfying, and you can really appreciate the level of power your heroes have achieved thanks to your wise rule.
Majesty 2 does a great job of capturing the feel of the original Majesty. That isn't hard to understand when you acknowledge the sheer magnitude to which it simply rips its content straight from it - all the way up to many characters' voicework being cribbed directly from the original game. The biggest difference between Majesties 1 & 2 is that the graphics have been updated from their original pixel sprites to full 3d models. In most cases, this isn't much of an upgrade at all, because Majesty was a very good-looking game that didn't try to do more than it was able. In some cases, the graphics are a downgrade (wizard spells look far less impressive) but in others it adds a much-appreciated boost (when your heroes upgrade their armor and weapons, you can now admire it, whereas in the first Majesty, you could not.) There are a couple very minor changes to the formula - fear flags can keep lower level characters away from an area (but not a monster, which is problematic since the game's most threatening enemies move around the entire map), and inns can allow the formation of parties of four heroes. Parties are a pretty neat addition to the formula, on the other hand, allowing you to pair your more fragile or foolhardy heroes with healers to extend their life expectancy.
All in all, just having more Majesty might be worth the price of admission - 40 dollars is less than full price, after all, and many gamers today were probably too young to appreciate the original when it came out. And I can't say I didn't enjoy my time with it. However, there are several reasons that I have begun to wish I simply purchased the 9.99 rerelease of hte original (with expansion) instead, and by extension, why I recommend you do the same if you have not already. First and most significantly, Majesty 2 lacks a free-play mode. While its missions will probably last many players somewhere in the range of 15 hours to beat, which isn't bad, the original Majesty had that and a random generation tool that allowed characters to experiment more outside the confines of missions, and to watch their heroes reach levels of power not possible during them.
A few other niggling points also cause the game's charm to suffer vis-a-vis the original. The mission types are less varied, for one - in many Majesty 1 missions, players would have several buildings and heroes to start out with which would limit their options in how to achieve victory. This was more beneficial than it was harmful, as it required new and innovative solutions instead of leading players to employ more or less the same build order in every mission. This is the flaw of Majesty 2, where only rarely are players saddled with additional buildings or heroes as a mission starts, leading to monotony in the opening sequence of each mission. The advent of a 'lords' system, by which players can save their favorite hero in each mission and hire him (at great expense) in the next is a poor means of compensating players for having to start at level one in each instance. The other minor detractor I noticed was that a lot of the class' personality was removed. Healers used to go out of their way to protect fighters and would plant healing herbs - rangers and barbarians were natural allies, elves would prefer gambling to adventuring and so on and so forth. While the AI underlying heroes' actions still varies across classes, the most intricate aspects of their variety have been stripped away.
At the end of the day, the Majesty formula proves that it is still a viable one for strategy games a decade after the original was first released. Majesty 2 is a fun game that is sure to keep players entertained until almost the last mission, where a bit of frustration at overpowered enemies may set in. In a vacuum, I would undoubtedly recommend this game to everyone - but unfortunately, the original Majesty still exists as a basis for comparison, with greater depth, greater variety, and greater replayability. For a player who'd have liked to see the series brought back in a way that benefited from all the advances in games since the original's release, the end result is more a shame than a triumph.