Tower Of Power

HIGH Addicting play loop. Excellent period music.

LOW Readability issues. Some elements seem too random.

WTF Why is the Mafia so mean to me? : (

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Having devoured Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket last month (it’s excellent, of course, you should read it, of course) I’ve been thinking that early 20^th century America gets short shrift in terms of artistic representation. I’m talking about, say, 1900 – 1938.

World War I ushered in an armada of modern horrors and casts a long historical shadow, but it’s a murky, chimerical conflict — it doesn’t have the obvious Good vs. Evil resonances of World War II. The Depression is, well, depressing, and being an economic and societal failure, it’s inherently less sexy and marketable to the masses. Not to mention, also, the awkward fact that we’ve learned little, if anything, from it. Worst of all, the vibrant music of the era has been co-opted into that most aberrant of modern pseudo-genre slop, electroswing.

Things really aren’t any better in the gaming scene. There aren’t any heavy hitters – across any genre – that truly embrace the era. None that I know of, at least. However, this could change with the 1.0 release of News Tower, a sweet and compelling strategy hybrid of colony manager and tycoon game whose mechanics put players into a vanished (but still relevant) place and time.

News Tower presents players with a side-on, ant colony-style view of a tower – initially squat and lowly, eventually grand and bustling – in which, believe it or not, news will be made. That means finding stories via telegraph, sending out reporters, typesetting their articles, and arranging them for production. All of this takes time – a lot of it, actually – with the Sunday print deadline always looming like a war-zeppelin on the horizon. Every story comes with content tags – crime, drama, sports, many more – and publishing multiple stories with the same tags gives big boosts to sales and subscribers.

When talking about mechanics-laden games, there’s always the risk of simply listing all the different mechanics, so to avoid that just know this is an interdisciplinary strategy experience, both macro and micro, demanding equal playerly attention to the high drama of Scoop Pursuit, as well as to the granular fiddliness of deciding where exactly on each reporter’s desk a fern plant should be placed to keep them happy. The primary sensation that News Tower evokes is of spinning about a dozen plates while standing on one foot, like some kind of big-top circus sideshow between the headliners.

These concerns converge like a swarm of militant hornets on the ol’ brainpan, and, while it is overwhelming in a way, it also creates an impressively compelling gameplay loop that slaps iron shackles on a player’s focus. Like many of the greats in the strategy space, it’s hard to find a good stopping place for a play session: there’s always something that needs attention, another goal to pursue, a new variety of potted plant to place tastefully upon a disgruntled employee’s desk.

It ain’t all sunshine and roses in the big city, though. The biggest musca domestica in the otherwise unctuous News Tower ointment is the UI and general visual clarity. Each reporter has three types of story they can cover, each with its own related icon. I’d like some additional visual cueing on the reporters, because it’s hard to remember who does what in the heat of a busy newsweek. This isn’t like X-COM, where each member of the team has a pronounced identity and specialty — even a small newsroom will have four or six reporters, all relatively anonymous in their matching fedorae and mackintosh coats.

Knowing exactly when a story will be ready to print, probably the most crucial thing to keep track of, is also harder to find than it should be. It’s easy to know when an individual step in the publishing process will be done, but the actual Ready-to-Print time is hidden away in a tooltip in a sub-menu. This means that unless a player does a lot of preparatory menu-perusing, it’s easy to queue up a story and discover it won’t be ready in time for Sunday. It’s frustrating.

There’s also just a damn lot to look after, dozens of menus and buttons and tabs – so much of it important at some point or another. The tutorial is actually a scripted campaign, and it does a good job highlighting a portion of this stuff (but not all of it) and not everybody is going to be down with a tutorial that can take longer than some whole games take to complete. After a few hours I dipped out and jumped into the deep end of the classic mode.

I want to end on a high note, though, so I’m going to return to the question of theming. A lot of management titles can have a sort of Excellian abstractness to them — a whiff of spreadsheet seeping out around their ostensible settings. Not so with News Tower. No, it evokes the golden age of paper news across its entire mechanical suite, bolstered further by an absolutely wonderful, period-appropriate live jazz soundtrack from Dutch ensemble New Cool Collective. To quote legendary schlock-peddler, Xanadu denizen, and all around freak William Randolph Hearst — it’s immersive as hell.

And from me? It’s an enthusiastic recommend.

Score: 8 out of 10

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Disclosures: This game is developed by Sparrow Night and published by Twin Sails Interactive. It is available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 20 hours of play were devoted to the game, and it was not completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is not yet rated by the ESRB. Obviously, a lot of the stories that crop up (many based on real historical facts) concern tragic events, and municipal corruption plays a big part. It’s all handled with a cartoony, light touch, however — lighter than what any kid would see on any news site or social media app on any given day. Not sure if younger gamers would cotton to the theme but, if they do, there isn’t anything here to worry about.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes present.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All of the dialogue is text-based, but it, as well as the menu text, cannot be resized. (See in-game examples above) An important sound cue occurs whenever a story comes in on the telegraph. It’s accompanied by an icon on the menu screen, but it’s a pretty small icon. Other than that, all important events are conveyed visually.

Remappable Controls: The game supports keyboard + mouse, but not controller. The keyboard controls are fully remappable.

The post News Tower Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

Readers, you disgust me. How many videogames do you need? I spend all year heaping your plate with digital comestibles, and then you rock up at the arse end of December, clamouring for a "selection box" like a flock of gannets.

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I’ve finally been playing News Tower, a management game where you’re put in charge of every facet of a 1930s newspaper. Like, every facet, from which reporters cover which stories to making sure the bathroom is clean. It’s the kind of video game stuff I tend to love, but all of it taking the form of running a news outlet hits a little too close to home.

One of the last freelance pieces I wrote before starting as managing editor of Kotaku in 2016 was a review of The Westport Independent, an indie newspaper management game that was mostly focused on the editorial end of things. I remember finding both the game and writing the review emotional, making me think about what my editing career had been up to that point and what it would look like in my new role. And while being managing editor involved, well, both managing and editing, there were still big chunks of the business that were firmly other people’s problems.

Not so now, and not so in News Tower. In the game, you inherit a struggling paper and, most crucially, the building it’s housed in. The newsgathering is pretty simple: your telegraph operators find news across the city and globe, and then you send a reporter to cover it based on their strength in its subject area, such as sports, crime, politics, or economy. When a reporter is done they hand their story off to be typeset and assembled, and at the end of the week, you arrange your stories onto the pages of a newspaper and print it off to be sold. All of this takes in-game time; you have to juggle how long stories take to report to make sure you have enough to fill your pages, and I’ve spent a lot of the game’s Sunday evenings muttering “come on, come on” as the assembly person’s progress bar slowly filled and the clock ticked down.

But you play as the publisher, not the editor-in-chief. Beyond the work of the paper itself, there are all kinds of other things to oversee. You lay out your newsroom, buying and placing everything from reporters’ desks to lamps to trash cans. The printing press takes up a ton of space, and it’s also hot and noisy, which saw me sequestering it to its own floor and then desperately arranging acoustic panels and tiny fans around it. You need paper, someplace to store the paper, and someone to carry the paper where it needs to go. Your employees get hungry and thirsty, so you need a water cooler and food for them. They need to use the bathroom, so you need air vents to keep the bathroom from stinking and an employee to keep it clean. Things break, so you need a repairperson to fix them. 

Employees will get uncomfortable if their physical needs aren’t met, slowing them down. I’m early in my first run with the game, and my person in charge of stocking supplies is unhappy with everything: it’s too dark at his desk, the printer is too loud and hot when he has to put paper in it, the bathroom is too stinky when he has to go in it. I’ve literally carried out his duties for him, using my mouse to drag boxes of paper from outside the news office up to the shelves as he meandered up and down the stairs, all while bemoaning our lack of paper. 

I’d like to give him another lamp or more fans or some help, but I currently have barely enough money to keep us in business. I’ve refused to take out a loan, even though I’ve been making extra money by doing deals for the mafia instead. I’ve sold off odds and ends to scrape together handfuls of dollars for something I need more urgently, swiping up reporters’ potted plants and clustering their desks around a single light bulb, swearing I’ll fix things later if we can just sell enough papers this week. This money stress has made me unkind to my virtual employees; I swung from making my reporters a lovely little newsroom to snapping “You wouldn’t complain about the lighting if you were out reporting” within a handful of in-game time.  

News Tower is paced such that none of this is too stressful mechanically. Since the reporting largely happens on its own once you set it ticking, you have plenty of time for this day-to-day management, and you can move and re-do your layout easily. The game gives you plenty of clues to what’s wrong, if you have the means to fix it. But emotionally, I’m finding it a lot. It feels like there’s so much to handle, and so much of it relies on money I don’t have, and I still want to make everyone happy and not fire anyone. On top of all that, I still really want to make a good, honest paper that highlights the most important news, even as I promise the mafia I’ll do the opposite. There’s so much to do and so few resources to do all of it perfectly, but I’m still so certain I can, even as this commitment just digs me deeper into an early-game hole.

I’ve never really had the experience of a management game not feeling fun because it’s too similar to my real life. A game like Frostpunk is a harsh setting I’ll never find myself in; Stardew Valley is a lovely escape that sands all the rough edges off actual farming. I usually love little chores in games like this, but all the little chores in News Tower are just pinging all my brain cells attuned to my real life chores. I recently got access to the game’s financial reports, and I’ll be honest I can barely look at them without thinking about my own real-life financial reports and all the responsibilities they entail. 

I’m drawn to the game because it’s about journalism, but maybe I’m not in a place to play a journalism management game right now. This might be praise for News Tower: It definitely feels like running a news outlet, or at least running a news outlet if you’re me, someone with an over-developed sense of responsibility and a self-imposed mandate to do everything perfectly that I should probably work out in therapy instead of in a video game. There’s definitely a lesson in here about priorities and time management that I badly need to learn. At least my real life news outlet is doing a lot better than my virtual one, and at least the only bathroom I have to deal with there is my own. (Which is also currently dirty, oh no.) 

I'm clicking the 'Add News' button on our site's back-end to write a news story about a game all about posting news the old-fashioned way, and I couldn't be more excited to see the Steam reviews for News Tower coming in hot off the presses, signaling the release of what's shaping up to be one of the best tycoon games of the year.

Read the full story on PCGamesN: News Tower, a pre-war tycoon game where you become a media mogul in 1930s New York, hits 1.0 to a rave reception