It’s always the case, isn’t it? You’re on holiday, trying to enjoy yourself and forget all the responsibilities you have waiting for you back at home, and then you go and get hit by a freak bolt of lightning and wind up back in the days of King Arthur, with more responsibility than you can handle! I hate it when holidays take that turn.
It’s always the case, isn’t it? You’re on holiday, trying to enjoy yourself and forget all the responsibilities you have waiting for you back at home, and then you go and get hit by a freak bolt of lightning and wind up back in the days of King Arthur, with more responsibility than you can handle! I hate it when holidays take that turn.
Fortunately for us, this time around it has happened to someone else, and we are more than happy to give them a helping hand. New Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is a superb management game that builds on its foundations slowly but surely, and provides players with a wonderful way to spend an evening or two.
In King Arthur’s quest to find the Fountain of Youth, the king isn’t all that interested in going after it himself in person. Rather, he’s sending out one of his best men – you, in fact – to explore the surrounding areas and find the magical water for him. Cue farming, mining, chopping and all other sorts of actions in a bid to push around the land and discover the fountain’s source.
On each of New Yankee‘s 40 levels you are given objectives to complete. However, you can’t simply jump straight to the problem – instead, you are required to gather the necessary resources first, and get your workers darting around with all sorts of tasks. For example, farming is free, but chopping down trees requires food. Mining, on the other hand, requires wood from the tree… and so on and so forth.
The end objectives usually involve building great monuments to the king or forging a path through rocks and mines, and balancing your use of your workers is the key to achieving your goals. If you’re efficient and fast enough, you’ll earn a gold medal for the level, and chasing these medals is rather addictive.
There are outside elements that look to help or hinder your progress. Magic spells can be used to speed up work, make your harvest grow faster and other such useful things. However, there are also goblins on the loose that will kidnap your workers if you aren’t careful. You can rack tasks up for your workers, and in this way you want to make sure no one is ever stood around idle.
There is so much variety in the game, and the rush of making sure everything is running like clockwork is glorious. It’s all casual enough that most players will be able to get into it, but more hardcore gamers will love chasing the gold medals and really putting serious thought into their tactics.
This variety does begin to wane towards the end of the game however, meaning that you eventually feel like you’re doing the same thing over and over again. It would have been great if there were more modes than just the single player campaign, but alas, this is all you get. That’s not to say it isn’t a great experience, but a little bit extra would have been appreciated such as, say, an endless mode.
We also encountered a couple of bugs throughout, which saw us complete the level and satisfy the objectives, yet the game did not register our win. It would appear that we were a little too quick for the game! Fortunately this only happened a couple of times.
New Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is really good fun, with plenty of twists on the management genre. Make sure you give the demo a try, as you’ll no doubt find it’s worth a full purchase.
