BREAKING NEWS – Strategy Sim News Tower Launches 1.0 Release!
Our reporter on the scene finds out more about the game and how it performs.
Ask anybody who reads the daily papers, and they will tell you that politics plays a major part in how the news is published – headlines need to stand out, major events should always take precedence, and your shadow investors should always get the say on what news you do and don’t publish. Well, I can’t actually vouch for that last one (and So Many Games certainly can’t afford a libel claim, even with our brand new Patreon), but that’s one of the choices available to you in the world of News Tower.
Set during the 1930s at the height of such delightful events as the Great Depression, you inherit a small newspaper (and its respective debts) from your uncle in the hopes of creating New York’s premier newspaper. There are two main aspects to the game split across a surprisingly complex building management simulator, requiring you to not only manage your staff, supplies and equipment but also to organise the reporting and ultimately the pagination of your paper ahead of its weekly printing. With every week you are given the choice of various goals across a map of the New York districts, each with their own preferences and tastes. This, along with the hidden agendas provided by various factions, including the mafia, members of high society and the military, requires you to include or exclude certain topics. At first this can be difficult but manageable if you spread your resources carefully, but as requests become increasingly complex and conflicted, you will need to manage every miniscule detail of your paper to prevent missing the deadline – the last thing you want to do is stop the presses!
Managing the building itself isn’t particularly taxing, with the placement of certain decorations and resources throughout each floor being imperative to keeping staff trained, happy and comfortable – these can come in the form of simple things such as walls to separate particularly troublesome rooms like the printer or bathroom, all the way to acoustic panels, listening devices and every kind of poster you could ever need. Staffing also requires a delicate balance, with maintenance being just as vital as reporting – you can’t print a week of news without a well-stocked printing press, and you certainly can’t keep your team in top form without food!
As the game progresses and more of the districts are unlocked, you can use the accrued reputation points from major stories to purchase items for your offices, up to and including additional pages for your paper – these aren’t the only rewards for expansion, however, with new prospects opening up in the form of adverts, new factions and the possibility for international reporting. Not only do these prospects give you new ways to increase your profits, but they also allow you to gain the competitive edge against other newspapers in the tri-state area.
There is a huge amount of growth and opportunity in the game, but it’s these prospects that also bring the game to a grinding halt early on. When you start, your resources are limited, and you need to use them wisely to increase your output – this is nothing new, but it’s these early stages which often show the glaring faults in the progression of News Tower, namely the number of options you don’t have at your disposal.
Your starting options leave very little room to improve or expand your operations effectively, meaning you need to rely entirely on growing into districts every week in order to increase profits – bear in mind you can only tackle one district at a time. This isn’t generally difficult to do, but the amount of time it takes to reach new resources can leave you wanting at the early stages. Combined with a gameplay loop that can become repetitive fairly quickly, it suffers greatly from the grinding of those first few steps to tabloid greatness.
Thankfully this opens up greatly when new resources become available or purchasable, but even when you can buy the best resources and send teams to investigate the wildest stories, you are usually reminded of those early days as you skip forward, waiting for a report to finish or removing sloppy editing from the drawer – there’s a sense of longing that comes with the wait for your next action, even in later parts of the game.
Despite this issue with pacing, the game still oozes charm – characters and objects are rendered in a simplistic fashion, with distinct colours and shading that emphasise the features of an object without needing to render it in obscene detail – while not minimalist by any stretch, it still favours basic forms and shapes at the core of its design.
News Tower also excels in sound design, not only with music that avoids feeling anachronistic in its 1930s setting, but also with the various alerts you will regularly hear throughout – the dots and dashes of a new story arriving through the telegraph station, the clacking typewriters and typesetting punctuated by the alarm bell ringing to remind you to roll the presses, and even just the diegetic sounds that remind you how bustling your office can be.
Setting out your office can be almost as entertaining as working out the weekly pagination for your paper, as some early access forums are dedicated entirely to making the most functional and stylish layouts possible, each sharing tips about the best place to stow your lawyer, how to shorten the production chain and even entire debates about where the best place for a set of toilets could be. With the possibility of spreading your printers throughout multiple floors and a fairly dynamic, adjustable layout, News Tower feels like the kind of game that fans will find new ways to enjoy even after official support ends – much like Balatro and Reus 2, the community definitely seems to be the strongest part of this game.
