Games worth discovering

Extra! Extra! Read all about an awesome newspaper sim that has you chasing headlines and money

470 View2024-02-13

News Tower

TacticalSandboxHistoricalCapitalismStrategyCraftingTime managementEarly Access

Get

SHOULD I PLAY NEWS TOWER?

Yep, especially if you love deep, challenging simulation games, or if you’ve ever dreamed of becoming the head honcho at a major New York City newspaper. News Tower is the full sim package, requiring equal parts time management, resource management, building layout, and creative input into what stories you assign your reporters to chase down each week. Running your own news empire isn’t easy, but News Tower makes it awfully fun.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve made it four hours deep into my first attempt at running a paper, although it’s been anything but smooth sailing. While I’ve managed to build my titular tower up to a third floor and have made progress on finding subscribers in a half dozen or so different neighborhoods, I’ve also had to take out a big loan from the bank and have had my building roughed up by mobsters more than once. I’m currently saving up to buy a fourth floor, at which point I’ll be able to expand my operations and hire some more reporters.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT NEWS TOWER?

• Controlling the narrative. Whether you trust the papers or not, there’s no doubt that a few shocking headlines have the power to shape public opinion. In News Tower, I was able to pick which stories my paper pursued, what deserved front-page placement, and which topics we chose to skip altogether. While my choices were often shaped by specific goals—for example, trying to build up an audience on Wall Street would require focusing more on stories about politics and the economy—I also was given free rein to set those goals beyond the short tutorial. I loved having all that power in my hands.

• A tense balancing act. While I wouldn’t say that News Tower is the most complex simulation game I’ve ever played, it definitely forced me to juggle a lot of elements at once. Beyond choosing where to send my reporters and what stories to print each Sunday, I had to manage the layout of my office, hire individual employees—including less glamorous jobs, like security guards and janitors—and even monitor the building’s paper stock to make sure we had enough on hand to keep the presses running. The game often feels like a puzzle in the way that the best sim games do, and I was overjoyed whenever I managed to make all the pieces fit.

• A great illustration of how tough it is to keep your integrity intact. The general tone that News Tower takes toward media isn’t cynical, per se, but the game is very aware of and honest about the reality of the many forces putting pressure on news publications. There’s the obvious layer of capitalism: In order for my paper to succeed I needed to make money, which meant growing my reader base, which sometimes meant cherry-picking specific headlines or focusing on certain topics that I knew would draw eyeballs (and thus, dimes). So right from the start, it’s clear that the news isn’t some pure, unbiased process.

It doesn’t stop there, though. In order to make more money or earn influence—a secondary currency that I could use to unlock further bonuses for my news empire—I was tempted by offers from various power players in society. Mafia thugs demanded that I run a specific story about a boxer throwing a fight; a politician requested that I not print any negative press in the lead-up to an election; high-society bigwigs asked me to tweak my coverage of the economy to keep the working class in order. I was able to earn big bonuses for acquiescing to these demands, and if I ignored them, I might risk my office being ransacked or a key reporter hospitalized.

News Tower presents these ethical dilemmas in a more direct way than they probably exist in most cases in the modern world. But even still, I found it to be a great way of introducing players to the forces at work on the media, which in turn will hopefully make those who check this game out more discerning and critical about what they read.

WHAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT IN NEWS TOWER?

• Progress can be slow. Like many sim games, News Tower features a handy fast-forward button that I was able to hold down to zoom through the week while my reporters were busy or while I was waiting for new story leads to come in. That’s all well and good, but I quickly hit a point where my broader progress slowed to a crawl. After I took out a loan to purchase a third floor, I spent well over a month in-game just stabilizing my cash flow again before I could even consider getting a fourth floor. Just know that once you start a game, you’ll need to be in it for the long haul.

• Randomness can screw you. While I was able to set my staff to look for stories about specific topics, like sports, crime, or entertainment, I also got screwed at times. For example, one week I was told by my mafia handlers to print two stories related to the mafia, or else. Just one problem: Whether or not stories related to the mafia actually pop up is completely at random, and on this particular week, I only discovered one of them. This element of luck seems true enough to real life, so I’m not holding it as a major knock against News Tower, but if you want complete control, you may get frustrated with some of these scenarios.

• The character limit for newspaper names. I had to name my paper The Failing New York Time, without the ‘s.’ I mean, it fits with the overall tone of the paper, but still.