News Tower

I have owned this game for just under 8 weeks, and have played it for more than 160 hours. I've been trying to analyze why I have been so obsessed with this game since I bought it: a big part of it is definitely the structure. It is by its nature a long game, because it goes for 10 years and you play a week at a time, gathering and preparing your news stories all week before releasing an edition of your paper every Sunday. But the fact that you're essentially playing in one-week "rounds" that last about 10 minutes means that this game is a major contender in the "just one more turn" category. There's also the fact that while the game has overall goals - boosting your readership, defeating the two competing papers - it's designed so that you set smaller goals for each week. There are six categories of news, and a good number of tags of varying rarity. Each week, you can set two goals: one will target a specific neighborhood, which you win over to your readership by printing stories with the specific tags they're interested in, and one will be to accomplish a specific task set by one of the power players in the city (the mayor, the socialite, the general, etc). This gives each week a unique combination of challenges to meet and keeps things equally engaging throughout the 10-year period of the game. Building and remodeling your tower is fun, especially as you uncover more items and features to improve employee morale and fight off the various threats you face. But that is a relatively minor component of the game overall. What really speaks to my innermost management sim desires is the weekly task of arranging my news stories to match as many tags as possible on each page of the paper. Not only does seeing the little "match" icon flash up satisfy something deep in my soul, making these matches increases your readership and therefore the money you make when you publish. After you publish each week, the game shows you a review of your performance on the challenges you selected as well as stats like how many papers you sold, and that's just inherently satisfying no matter how you did. The art style is charming and the music is the best kind for this sort of experience- immersive, not so interesting that it's distracting but interesting enough that you can hear it for hours without getting tired of it. I bought the game as a fully finished product so I was not really expecting substantive updates, but I've been surprised and pleased to see that the design team is still doing work and planning on more. The recent update adding difficulty levels was awesome: I was actually starting to get a bit bored in the endgame but the newly-added "hard' difficulty level made everything much more challenging. This is a fantastic game and I'd recommend it to anybody. Give the demo a try if it sounds at all interesting, and if you enjoy the demo you will absolutely love the game.