News Tower

Tried first the demo because I wasn't sure if it was just another micromanaging, boring and repetitive game but I was pleasantly surprised. Very relaxing and quite interesting, getting more and more complex as you progress. You'll find yourself spending hours on it without even realizing it.

It starts out as a lot of fun, but mid and late game is rather grindy. It lacks something to strive for, something to say, yes thats my newspaper, my accomplishment. The competition isn't really a competition merely a static placeholder, so it is just a matter of time. Still there is so much to like about this game, enough to recommend it to people that like to start a newspaper company.

Wow, just wow. This game is to the newspaper industry what the legendary The Movies had been to the cinema one. Even if you're a tycoon veteran, I bet its game mechanics will positively surprise you. Simplifying, this is the core gameplay loop: hire telegraphists to research news stories, send journalists to report on them, transform reports into a newspaper articles, compose your newspaper issue with them, hit publish on Sunday, cash in and repeat. But it's way more than that. Money is not the only thing that matters: you'll need influence to buy new objects and techs and progress in your campaign. You can obtain it by increasing readership and fulfilling the needs of one of the four powerful city factions (mafia, mayor, army, high society). These have opposing interests, so you have to choose your allegiance, plus you need to meet the reading preferences of readers in each district if you want their subscription money. Each piece of news comes with tags, so choosing the right tags when you assemble your newspaper on Sunday affects the money and influence you can earn and whether you're advancing a faction's agenda and your reputation with it. You've made a wrong move, with things not going as planned? Prepare for lawsuits, angry mobs, mobsters, and more nuisances to disrupt your newspaper operations. But trust me, I'm just scratching the surface here. There are a lot of different mechanics that seem to be perfectly balanced with each other, forcing you to make a lot of trade-off management choices - exactly what you want from a game of the genre. For example, are you going to publish that piece of news with the sports tag? It'll give you a bonus next to your other pieces in the same page, but it'll push your newspaper issue towards being sensationalistic (as opposed to informational). This will annoy the army general, so you'll miss out on his influence and get a reputation hit with him. On the other hand, that sports piece comes with a triumph tag, which you do need to gain subscribers in the district you're targeting this week... maybe you can swap it with the crime piece, but will it be ready before Sunday morning? As you progress, the core gameplay loop becomes more complex, exactly like in The Movies: editors can improve the quality of a piece, photographers will add pics to your articles, the right objects will affect the performance of your staff, resulting in faster production cycles, and so on. Distance in your building matters too: you can freely build your news tower at your heart's content, but some configurations will be more effective than others. News pieces have to flow from reporters' hands to editors and then typesetters. Paper is delivered at the entrance and it needs to be loaded by haulers in the printer. But telegraphers (and toilets!) too need paper to operate. And so on. A smooth layout is the difference between a complete Sunday newspaper full of hot topics and a half-baked one with stale news. Two final outstanding things to mention: a phenomenal UI that transforms as you prepare for the weekly printing run (for example, you'll have to actually pull a lever to trigger the industrial printer), making you feel a key part of the process; and an amazing jazz and swing soundtrack, with great music and superb sound effects that make you feel thrilled every Sunday after your newspaper issue has been published. Again, I hadn't seen anything like that from the times of The Movies. Big bonus points. Last but not not least, I found zero bugs or glitches. The game is very stable. Summing up: you like tycoon games? Buy it at full price - it's worth more than that. The developers have done a stunning job with this one.

[b]Good[/b] Let’s start with the good, because there’s a lot of it. This game does many things really well. The music and visuals are excellent, and the gameplay loop is genuinely addictive. At its core, the game is fun, engaging, and easy to sink hours into, even if it’s not without its flaws. [b]Quality of Life[/b] There are several QoL issues that hold the game back. You can’t copy items, which makes navigating the menus unnecessarily frustrating. The printing menu also lacks filters for news items, making it harder to manage content as your operation grows. I also really missed a help menu or glossary. There’s no way to revisit the tutorial or easily look up what certain mechanics do. This is especially problematic because many systems are either poorly explained or not explained at all (both in-game and in the forums). For a management game with hidden but important mechanics, clearer explanations are essential. [b]Missing Overviews[/b] The game expects a lot of micromanagement to optimize article flow and efficiency, but it doesn’t provide the tools to support that. Inefficiencies are difficult to identify and even harder to fix. While you can check the status of individual articles, there’s no clear overview that helps you understand what’s going wrong at a glance. The same problem exists in the building menu. It’s cluttered and disorganized, and I frequently had to open it and click through multiple menus just to find a single item. [b]Bugs[/b] The game also has some bugs. The ordering of items in both the building menu and the staff menu doesn’t work as intended. Collapsing news articles is also broken, as you still see the title even after collapsing them. I also had two instances where the game froze at the start of a day. [b]Experience & Progression[/b] In my 28 hours with the game, I initially thought this was meant to be a cozy, low-stress experience where failure only happens if you actively mess up. The game doesn’t seem to lead you toward a fail state; until it suddenly does. After unlocking the “auto paper delivery” upgrade, everything went downhill very quickly. The upgrade doesn’t function correctly: it fails to deliver enough paper, and printing your newspaper results in a massive fine. What made this even worse is how saving works. When you load a save, the game starts at the printing phase of the last day. If you had a time-sensitive quest, it can fail immediately upon loading and then get overwritten due to the single rolling autosave. Manual saves during the day work correctly, but the end-of-day autosave—which feels like the most natural stopping point—does not. A combination of the issues mentioned above and other factors caused a run with no warning signs whatsoever to come to an abrupt end. The suddenness made it feel deeply frustrating and unfair. [b]Final Thoughts[/b] This game excels in one of the most important aspects of any game: the gameplay loop. It’s absolutely brilliant and makes you want to play “just one more day.” However, it has some rough edges with missing QoL features, bugs, and a limited save system. Its biggest flaw is the lack of organization and overviews. Only through trial and error can you make your operation run smoothly, or else you fail miserably. While this formula works in a roguelike or in level-based management simulators like Two Point Hospital, it doesn’t work as well here. My experience ultimately left me with more of a bitter aftertaste than I would expect from a game I’ve been binging over the past few days. For now, I won’t be playing it anymore, but it’s only a matter of time until that great gameplay loop calls me back again.

Its a good game but I cannot recommend it, because for me it was just not fun. The short version would be that the quality of life is horrendous. Playing on the normal intended difficulty the game is not hard, its never hard. The positive is that you are making interesting decisions all the time that still makes you engaged and tickles your brain. Its a good balance between not being too hard while also not being boring, it goes in the direction of giving you several good options and its up to you to find the optimal one. The first issue that I noticed is that in regards to building your tower, you just never feel happy with what you've done. Not because of you, but because of the limits being put on you. I've played for 20 hours and I am far away from being able to make even a single floor I am happy with, it all looks like ♥♥♥♥ and the game won't let me do better. If you looked at the trailer or the pictures and thought "wow that looks nice" your tower won't look like that pre 40 hours, is fake marketing. You are short on resources and money constantly, your costs are running away (workers becoming seniors) and you pretty much have an urgent need to increase profitability all the time. Meaning you are pushed into investing your hard eared upgrades into things that gives you monetary value. All the other things, practical user friendly upgrades, things that looks nice and makes you workers happy, transport items and so on needs to be downprioritized. Even if you would buy the pretty things instead, you would be stuck with a small newspappers, or a big empty newspaper with not enough articles. Its a situation where you always feel you need 20 things now but only ever get to choose one or two for every hour of playing. I could play 20 more hours and unlock the nice things and maybe then it would be fun, feels like sucha a shame to me. Then we have the gameplay, a tutorial that bores you to death. Spies that invade your tower while you have to juggle different pages covering most of the screen all the time to get news. Comfort items not stacking even though it looks like they do. Adds system on a seperate screen that never shows you when your workers are iddle. I wished I had a pretty newstower, I wished the gameplay wasn't watching the map covering 70% of the screeen. Why cant I queuee my reporters to go to certain articles as soon as available, why wont my guard blow the whistle when a spy invades my tower. There are just so many user hostile design decisions, I was entertained in the beginning but I never really got the point of having fun with this game and its a shame because it feels like I should have.

Absolutely fantastic management game. Really one of the best out there with skills that keep on expanding, and new mechanics being introduced way late in your playthrough. Man, I just want to print one. More. Newspaper!

Good game overall, but way too repetitive. You have basically seen everything after 6 hours of gameplay. The only difference in the endgame is small additions, but you’ve already seen everything the core game has to offer after exploring just one-third of the map. Don’t be tricked by the demo. There is approximately everything in it, and you won’t get much more content in the full game. There are no major gameplay changes or important new mechanics when buying it — just more time to play and small additions that increase micromanagement. You end up playing this game by pausing every time you need to do something and fast-forwarding when you have to wait. Good, but lacking interest and depth.

把报纸名称设置成了《妈妈报报》，感觉被爱了