New Yankee in King Arthur's Court Reviews

You will probably enjoy this if you like this genre.

"New Yankee in King Arthur's Court" is a pointless "12 Labours of Hercules" screen tapper/clicker game. There's no gameplay, just tapping on the screen. The game is made to look like you're making interesting decisions as you're presented with a map of a town/village/pathway that has you clicking on various things to collect things which are then consumed when you click on an obstacle, which unlocks more things to click on. This is so lame and shallow, you could write a script to randomly click the screen and given enough time, it would beat the game. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics. The game features simple, cartoony 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort mobile apps. 3D graphics programming does require a degree of skill and competence and unfortunately not all developers have the budget or talent to deliver this, despite 3D graphics cards hitting the mainstream in the 1990's. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing. The game only displays in 4:3 pillarboxed aspect ratio (although it does have flat texture "wings" to fill the side panels). It's possible they developed this using an old CRT they found in a dumpster, or this game has been specifically designed for people gaming on PC's from 1995... either way, this isn't really acceptable in the modern era of PC gaming. The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here. This looks and feels like a mobile app, but I wasn't able to find it on the app stores. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all). Regardless, for all intents and purposes "New Yankee in King Arthur's Court" might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this only appears around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards. "New Yankee in King Arthur's Court" has the laughable, eye-watering price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. Because this is the kind of game you can just play for free on mobile phones, it's impossible to recommend anyone should pay money for the same experience on Steam.

I’d like to give a mixed review, but since I can't, I'll give it thumbs up. It’s a fairly typical resource management game, but it has a few drawbacks. I didn’t like trading with the merchant for resources, because it’s not obvious what you have to do to get the merchant to show up and some levels are unbeatable without the merchant. Another drawback is that there are intruders that repeatedly need to be clicked on to drive them away. I think that gets old quickly. However, this game gets a thumbs up because on some levels you can build watchtowers to automatically shoot down the intruders without having to click on them yourself.

Similar to many other games of its genre - gather resources in an appropriate sequence against the clock. It's reasonable enough to kill a few hours.

So I played a couple of levels before I refunded (and I got all 3 games at 2 Euros, not even worth that). There isn't really any actual time management going on in this game. It's way too easy. Like I played like 5 levels and I hit gold on each one with easy (with a restart after the introductory text and I figured out what play you need to take, which I regularly do). Also the "hints" are placed right over stuff you actually need to see and interact with so you are in a constant loop of seeing what you need to do to learn the game - and actually being able to do it. Yeah, this isn't a "Ballad of Solar", it's not even "Rescue Team". Can't recommend this at any price.

New Yankee in King Arthur's Court is a very simple time management game. It's fairly easy and somewhat fun, but not very challenging. Get it on sale or in a bundle.

A+ Good funny game play.. Variable difficulty... from easy to challenging... recommended. Works well with Steam Play (Proton) on Linux.

Nice game to play for relaxing, with just a hair of thinking needed. It's pretty short; each level takes approximately 3 minutes to complete, give or take. Worth it for the low cost.

Not worth the money even at the 90% discount. The game has a story, but doesn't even have an ending! You just get to level 40 and it's completely unfinished. Bleah. The gameplay is okay, but nothing worth writing home about, and there's no real motivation to get gold vs silver in the individual games.

[h1]Short version: 65%[/h1] Despite its age, New Yankee brings several new tricks to the time management genre. If you like these kinds of games, you will enjoy it, but get ready for a steep difficulty curve. [h1]Long version:[/h1] New Yankee uses the same basics as any similar time manager: use workers to gather resources, then spend those on clearing obstacles and making production buildings. I know, all of them use this formula. However, almost all of these elements get an interesting twist here. For example, you don't have to micromanage the workforce. Need another worker? Then build a cheap house. There are up to seven of these guys, so the problem is not waiting for them to finish a task but keeping them busy. Similarly, bonuses (faster movement, more income) act as a fourth resource, so using them requires some strategy. When we combine these, we get a surprisingly fast-paced time manager, where even the longest stages last barely five minutes. Since there are only 40 of them in total, you'd think the game is short—but this is where you'd be wrong. New Yankee is surprisingly unpredictable. Some stages are like a puzzle with only a single solution; others give you total freedom. You can finish some levels in less than half of the par time; others can be down to the last millisecond. This game is frantic. It is also fun, despite not having any actual story to it. I cannot recommend it if you are inexperienced with time managers, but otherwise, you should have fun with it!