It’s probably no surprise that we’ve been living in ‘interesting times’ since time immemorial, however, the way that news travels — and the news that does travel — is largely defined by the fourth estate. In News Tower you take charge of a newspaper during the USA’s Great Depression, and with that the responsibility of informing, entertaining, misleading or terrifying the populace.
News Tower puts you in the role of an up and coming media mogul in 1930s USA. It kicks off with you inheriting the deeds to a small, independent paper — as well as a few issues that your uncle managed to pick up along the way — however, in no time you’ll be bolting on new floors and adopting new technologies to try and expand your audience.
Of course, as with real life, getting the biggest readership isn’t just about being a nice person. If you want to win over new communities then you’ll need to achieve combos or cover certain types of stories: An upper-class neighbourhood might only come over if you’re conservative-leaning and covering financial or business stories during the month that you target them. Thankfully, you have quite a bit of control over this as you’ll pick out the area you want to target on the same web-style map screen that you’ll use to interact with shops, unlocks and factions.
But, that’s the top layer of News Tower. The nitty-gritty comes in making sure that the layout, features and purpose of your tower are carefully managed. Yes, that does mean that you will have substantially worse performance if people need to travel three flights of stairs to deliver their report to the editors, or if they need to use the toilet. When your printing press can easily take up an entire floor, and elevators can only hold a certain number of people, there’s a a lot of considerations to be made about efficient layout. Similarly, there’s a shed-load of decorations and items that can boost the effectiveness of your editorial teams, so carefully assigning desks to the right people is really important.
With the foundations in place, and — with any hope — your team firing on all cylinders, it then comes down to actually acquiring, reporting on and assembling the stories, before placing them into your sheet. Each story has at least one modifier attached to it, most of the early ones are the story type (entertainment, politics, etc) however there are also modifiers such as if they’re a hot story, if they’re to do with crime and much more. These each have intrinsic values to them, not only in how they impact your readership, but how they play with each other — in short, they can combo if you put them together.
At the start of your News Tower playthrough you’ll probably simply just try to fill your pages, but as you get more and more stories you’ll soon outpace the number of pages that you have, and it’ll instead become a satisfying puzzle where your pay-out and audience growth (and revenue) is directly tied to how you slot these pieces together.
I think that’s why I enjoyed News Tower so much: Because it’s actually got an incredible number of things in common with ‘engine builder’ tabletop games. Ultimately, your playing pieces are the articles that you place into the pages, however you enhance them by better up a better production system and you retool that to try and capture the audiences that then give you the funds to expand.
I’ve largely talked about the mechanical bread and butter of the game, however there’s plenty of other notable things dangling off that rather robust skeleton. For a start, I’m a big fan of the era-appropriate music and art-design, and while the floppy-limbed character models feel like a weaker point, an incredibly amount of effort has gone into authenticity. I also found it fascinating that the headlines were real-world ones, and that, in itself, is both galling and commendable… in fact, it’s probably that, more than the mechanics, that’ll stick with me long after News Tower is uninstalled.
News Tower is available now for PC & Mac.
