A Defective Port of a Generous Strategy Game
New Yankee: Through the History Mirror is breaking me. The premise is that a witch, knight, goblin, dog and flying book have found a mirror that sends them back through time. They go ‘back’ to feudal China, renaissance France and the Wild West. Ignoring the fact that these are fictional, fantasy creatures, it’s clear that the main characters are inspired by the medieval era. There’s a frigging knight, for god’s sake. How can the Wild West be in the past? History buffs are probably tossing their Simon Schama books out of the window in a huff.
We hope you can look past the obvious historical faux pas. Because New Yankee: Through the History Mirror Collector’s Edition is not completely without merit.
We’re Going Back…to the Future
New Yankee: Through the History Mirror follows in the well-trodden footsteps of the Gnomes Garden, Farm Frenzy or Rescue Team series. Anyone who has played one of those games will know what to expect: a resource-management game crammed onto a single game screen. Buildings generate resources on a timer, and your cursor scoots over to pick them up. With those resources, you can erect more buildings and clear pathways. Those clear pathways give you access to more obstacles and resources, and so on.
These games take a puzzle-like approach to the strategy genre. The challenge comes from the order in which you do things. Should you upgrade a mill to generate food, or should you opt to clear a path to some trees, which can net you lumber? The cost of these decisions are time and perhaps a star ranking. The stakes are unbelievably low, which is why I think the genre does so well. Players like to play them as cosy games.
New Yankee is simultaneously one of the better examples of the genre, and a game to be wary of. It may be a cosy game, but it is absolutely capable of sending you into a fury.
Stuffed to the Battlements With Content
What I love most about New Yankee is how generous it is. On a micro and macro level, there is so much care dolloped onto it. Play two levels in succession, and there will be barely any overlap in the things you build and the objectives you complete. In one level you might be blowing holes in a train, while another might have you toppling golems.
This is a genre where we’re used to sequels and glaringly obvious asset reuse, But New Yankee isn’t like that. It upturns that expectation and decides to surprise the player instead. That generosity of spirit is true of the game as whole, too. There are a ridiculous number of levels in total, including the ‘Collector’s Edition’ bonus levels. We’d estimate that there’s about twenty hours of play for your £5.79.
It captures the joy of these sims well. It knows that people don’t want to get stuck because they have run out of resources, and they don’t want to be dealing with constant enemies. Other games in the genre get this wrong. New Yankee: Through the History Mirror is forgiving, letting you reset the trees, gold and other resource nodes with a wave of your magic wand (or magical spellbook in this case). There are no dead-ends in New Yankee.
There’s something inexplicably satisfying about completing a level. You aren’t doing much more than clicking on stuff and watching a worker deal with it, but therein is a joy. More and more of the map becomes available as you clear pathways, and that blooming outwards is neat. Building up stockpiles in anticipation of something huge also feels vindicating. There’s a glow to be found in gaining more resources than you will ever need.
This strong core allows New Yankee: Through the History Mirror to weather a number of problems that would have been debilitating for other games. It just about emerges at the other side with a net-positive response from us. But it’s close.
What’s the Opposite of ‘Quick Resume’?
New Yankee is buggy in all the wrong places. The biggest is a hell of a Quick Resume bug. If you try to return to a save via Quick Resume, that save will be corrupted. You will have to start all over again. Considering this is a 20-30 hour game, we cannot describe the feeling of losing that amount of progress. Please, never, ever use the Quick Resume feature.
It’s also not fully ported to console. There is a jousting minigame that can only be played with a mouse. A mouse tutorial appears onscreen, and you cannot press any button on the controller to reverse back from it. Your only recourse is to restart. These weren’t the only crashes or hangs that we experienced.
New Yankee: Through the History Mirror is also an ugly game, with late ‘90s 3D models and animations. The clutter onscreen also gets in the way, as New Yankee can be a hard game to read. This is most true for when you can’t do something. A red flash will tell you that you can’t remove a blockage, but it’s difficult to know why. Is it because I don’t have enough resource, I can’t reach the blockage, or is there some other reason? New Yankee stares blankly and shrugs.
It’s like New Yankee comes with a second, unintentional layer of puzzle. What on earth does it want me to do? An avalanche of text boxes appear at the start with some indications, but you often haven’t got the context to make sense of them. It’s only later when you’re trying to work out what you’ve missed that you wish they could reappear.
A Cracked Mirror
There’s a parallel dimension where I would happily hold New Yankee up as the best example of the Gnomes Garden genre. It can be difficult to know which of these games to play, and this is so generous and stuffed that it makes a fantastic entry point.
But that parallel version of New Yankee doesn’t have this game’s bugs, crashes and corrupted saves. Unfortunately, on our side of the History Mirror, we get volley after volley of them. I’d love to say that New Yankee: Through the History Mirror is best-in-class for the resource-management genre, but the bugs say no. Its mirror is cracked.
Important Links
New Yankee: Through the History Mirror Collector’s Edition Jumps Onto Xbox – https://www.thexboxhub.com/new-yankee-through-the-history-mirror-collectors-edition-jumps-onto-xbox/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/new-yankee-through-the-history-mirror-collectors-edition/9PL5N86GB7MQ/0010
