*A review code for News Tower was provided.
Have you always wanted to run your own newspaper? Neither have I, but News Tower gives you the opportunity and the tools to set up your own news tower (hence the name), and it turns out to be an entertaining pastime, at least for a while.
News Tower, developed by Sparrow Night, is a so-called tycoon game. You start out as a small, local newspaper and can eventually grow it into a leading, agenda-setting influence in 1930s New York.
Let me start this review by saying that I am anything but a tycoon expert. The last tycoon game I played was RollerCoaster Tycoon. A great game, by the way. Making visitors throw up, leaving roller coasters just barely unfinished with catastrophic consequences. I remember it like it was yesterday.
After discovering, to my dismay, that I couldn’t make my journalists in News Tower throw up or die, I decided to put my best foot forward and make the most of it. My newspaper, which I named Ins & Outs, was ready to conquer New York.
The Tutorial Can Feel a Bit Hectic, but Progression Settles Into a Nice Pace Afterward
Before you can start firing information at your readers, News Tower fires a whole lot of information at you first. The tutorial pushes you through the basics at a high speed. Luckily, you can pause time while your assistant walks you through the different mechanics.
There’s quite a lot to take in. Your main task consists of gathering leads, assigning them to the right journalist, and then selecting and printing the right articles on Sundays. On top of that, you’re responsible for hiring your team and building a pleasant and efficient workspace.
Thankfully, the tutorial is well structured and made up of short messages that have you perform practical actions. That’s a learning style that has always worked best for me, and it proves effective here as well.
“The balance between being guided and going off on your own to discover things is strong.”
After the tutorial, you’re ready to start making money with your first newspapers. Still, quite a bit is left to the imagination. The balance between being guided and going off on your own to discover things is strong.
One downside is that you sometimes get tutorials for features you don’t yet have access to. If you’re anything like me, you’ll have completely forgotten about that tutorial by the time you do unlock something new. Tightening this up would improve the game’s flow.
Every time I thought I had a handle on the basics, a new mechanic was introduced, such as competitors trying to infiltrate your tower or trainable traits for your employees. This keeps your playthrough feeling fairly fresh, even though the main gameplay loop remains essentially the same. The former made me keep tacking on “just one more hour.” The latter is why I didn’t end up playing News Tower all the way to the bitter end.
Selecting the Right News
Early on, your team is small enough that you might struggle to fill your newspaper at all. Later on, you’ll have more than enough sources and will need to start making choices about which articles you think will resonate most with your readers.
News items are divided into several main categories: crime, economy, entertainment, politics, society, and sports. Within each of these base categories, you can also uncover certain “hidden” subcategories, such as dirt within politics and sports.
In News Tower, your paper focuses on a wide range of different districts. Each district has its own preference for specific types of news. Every time you print your paper on Sunday and wrap up that week’s session, you can select a district to focus on for the following week. At a glance, you can see which news items are most in demand there.
Based on this information, you can instruct your telegraphers to prioritize certain topics, increasing your chances of receiving the best leads. You then assign those leads to a journalist who has expertise in the relevant category. This is done simply by dragging your chosen journalist into the news dossier.
The journalist then needs a certain number of hours or days, depending on their skill level in that subject, to write the article.
During this time, the journalist is, naturally, unavailable for other assignments. That makes it important to build a well-rounded team that complements itself properly. Each journalist has knowledge in three different topics. If they’re skilled in sports, crime, and economy, for example, they can’t be used for entertainment, politics, or society.
Managers Take Note: Happy Employees Are Good Employees
You can hire new employees at any time. These can be journalists, but also telegraphers, repair workers, or cleaners. Each of them comes with their own qualities, specialties, and traits. The better they are, the higher the salary you’ll have to cough up every week.
Every time you send a journalist out on an assignment, they gain experience and progress toward the next level in the category you assigned them to. As a result, the time needed to complete an article in that same category is significantly reduced, making that journalist available again more quickly for the next piece.
But a good manager knows that it’s not just about speed. I firmly believe that happy employees are good employees. Unfortunately, that opinion isn’t shared by all managers, but in News Tower you can set the right example, and you’re rewarded for it.
Unhappy employees can deliver sloppy work, which can end up costing you subscribers and income once the paper goes to print. Through well-organized (and nicely designed) menus, you can keep a close eye on your employees’ mood.
That mood is influenced by how pleasant their workspace is, and sometimes by the employee’s traits. Smell, heat, and noise pollution are, for example, disastrous for morale and, by extension, the effectiveness of your staff. The tolerant trait is a nice, albeit expensive, solution. My main man Vladimir Abrams, pictured in the screenshot above, doesn’t give a shit about anything. The ideal employee.
That’s why I placed Vladimir’s desk right next to the loud, heat-producing printing machines. This allows me to reserve desks in better conditions for employees whose concentration does suffer from those kinds of issues.
You want to set up your news tower in a way that minimizes dissatisfaction and keeps walking distances between departments as short as possible.
I Actually Enjoyed Setting up the News Tower More Than Working on the Newspaper
Once I had assembled my team, I noticed that I started to run a large part of the process on autopilot. Without thinking about it too much, I picked the right priorities, dragged the available journalists into the correct dossiers, and simply focused on the mission of covering as many topics as possible that would please the district.
I got the most enjoyment out of building and expanding the workspace. The building system in News Tower is well put together, and it’s genuinely enjoyable to make sure everything within your walls runs like a well-oiled machine.
Every employee obviously needs a desk, and printing your newspaper is done using large, loud, and expensive machines. But there’s much more to consider than that. Think toilets, water coolers, lights, trash cans. All of it influences the mood, and therefore the performance, of your staff.
“Once I had assembled my team, I noticed that I started to run a large part of the process on autopilot.”
You can switch between different overlays, including a particularly useful one that shows exactly how far the heat and/or noise from certain machines or objects reaches, and who might be affected by it.
By adding ventilation in the toilets and near the desks of adjacent employees, you can counteract bad smells, while acoustic panels help reduce noise. Accessories like plants and clocks also provide a morale boost, and unlockable items such as scale models and posters give boosts to specific news topics.
With hefty investments, you can also add extra floors, which of course need to be accessible via doors and staircases (or later, elevators). More printing presses allow you to print more pages on Sunday. All of this costs a significant amount of money, but it definitely pays off in the long run and is a must if you want to conquer New York.
You can choose to save up and earn the required money in an ethical way, or you can take a shortcut and start working with the many factions that exert influence over New York. Think the mayor, high society, or the mafia.
Do You Sell Your Soul to the Different Factions?
It’s up to you whether you want to run a trustworthy paper, or allow yourself to be influenced by the various factions that have their own interests. The mafia, for example, might ask you to stop printing crime news for a week, in exchange for rewards like money and prestige (prestige can be used to unlock important new items and other benefits).
Factions are interconnected. If you decide to work with the mafia, for instance, you automatically end up working against the mayor. Your standing rises with one faction while dropping with another. The higher your reputation with a faction, the better the rewards they offer. Eventually, this can mean things like selling prestige for cash, or negotiating better salaries for your employees (better for us, the employer, that is).
So you can never keep everyone happy, unless you choose not to work with factions at all. Thankfully, that freedom exists. You’ll miss out on certain rewards, but at least you can look yourself in the mirror when you have full control on Printing Day.
Printing Day Is Fun, but I Would Have Loved for It to Stress Me Out a Bit More
Once the workweek comes to an end, it’s time to take stock. There’s some time pressure leading up to that moment, since you obviously want to make sure the most important articles are finished in time for Sunday.
You drag the articles onto your pages and can immediately see how many dollars they’re going to bring in. By printing the most sought-after topics, you gain more subscribers and unlock neighboring districts and buildings that can provide additional bonuses.
Certain spots in your newspaper offer extra advantages, and combining similar, popular topics pushes your income even higher.
The quality tags of articles (bronze, silver, and gold) and any ads you include also have a significant impact. Perception matters too. Some articles turn your paper into a sensationalist one, while others give it a more informative reputation.
And another factor that affects your income is—shocker—the price of your newspaper. You can choose to keep it cheap and accessible, or raise the price instead.
It’s always fun to see the numbers go up, break your sales records, and watch new subscribers roll in. Still, Printing Day should have been the climax of the workweek, and something more than just fun.
I never once felt stressed on Printing Day. I was always curious to see how much profit I’d make, but I think the game could have held my attention longer if I’d been sweating over whether that decisive article would be finished just in time, and if the consequences went beyond simply making a bit more or less weekly profit.
Think transfer deadline day in Football Manager. Always a special moment, where the hours fly by with every click and you’re still hoping to land that star signing just before the deadline hits. That kind of all-or-nothing tension is what Printing Day was just missing to make it truly exciting.
Conclusion: News Tower Is Chill. For Me, a Bit Too Chill
There are plenty of mechanics to dive into and things to keep in mind in News Tower. However, I personally found the gameplay loop starting to feel a bit dull after about 10 hours, with my total playtime eventually landing at 15. During this time I never really felt any financial pressure, even though loans are an option and I didn’t even have to place ads.
A bit more pressure would have gone a long way for me. As it stands, News Tower mostly feels like a fairly relaxed pastime. The jazzy, noir soundtrack fits the game perfectly in that regard, playing in the background as your employees move around the tower you designed. It also sports a unique art style that I genuinely appreciate.
I mentioned at the start that I’m neither a tycoon expert nor a hardcore fan of the genre, and that’s worth keeping in mind. I’m convinced that tycoon fans will absolutely appreciate News Tower. There’s plenty here where I can clearly see the quality, even if I personally didn’t stick with it all the way until becoming the undisputed King of New York.
