News Tower is a tycoon game developed by Sparrow Night and published by Twin Sails Interactive. The title was released on Steam in early access on 13 February 2024 and is set to leave early access on 18 November 2025.
Not only does News Tower put us in charge of a newsroom, it also allows us to physically build a journalism empire. The game begins when we inherit the family newspaper from our uncle, who has fled to a tropical paradise. Without two pennies to rub together, we attempt to revive the family newspaper. We soon discover that this will often involve getting involved in shady dealings with politicians and mobsters.
News Tower: breaking news
In News Tower, we take on the role of managing a small 1930s newspaper with a tiny readership and a tiny staff. Our goal is to grow into a journalism giant and dominate our competitors. We will manage every detail of our editorial office, including building rooms, adding floors and purchasing machinery and equipment to facilitate expansion. We will also be responsible for hiring staff and taking care of their needs. We will decide which news stories they should cover and which they should ignore.
News Tower is a complex tycoon game that enables us to oversee every aspect of our business. On the one hand, we have the management of the building itself.
Our tower is divided into floors, and we can decide how to structure it, starting from the base provided in the tutorial. We will need to provide desks for the editors, as well as the tools required to assemble and send the newspaper to print.
Not to mention all the services our employees need, such as toilets and catering facilities. As we unlock new equipment, we can speed up production, add new pages and hire new staff, such as editors and lawyers. We will also acquire items that will allow us to improve our reporters’ skills. These items will have to be placed strategically near their workstations.
Internal building management mainly involves expanding the number of desks or printers. The ability to select and store multiple items in the stash without having to resell and repurchase them also makes any changes to the building easier. This is also useful for temporary changes, such as swapping the telegraph operator’s desk for the lawyer’s when space is limited.
We also have to consider the staff themselves, for example whether to hire new staff or train existing ones. We can assign unique traits to staff that provide benefits, such as speeding up the work of other journalists writing on the same topic.
In addition to building management, the other key component is news gathering. Our telegraph operators will look for scoops, but we will decide where to send our journalists. Each reporter has specialisms, and their level influences both how quickly the news will be written and its quality.
The research and writing phase is crucial because we will need to manage the reporters, deciding which news stories to cover and whether to explore them in greater depth. This will result in us obtaining different topic tags, which, as we will see, are fundamental in attracting readers’ interest.
This aspect of the process requires considerable strategy and planning. Strategy is needed to pick up news on specific topics, and planning is important to ensure the news is completed in time for publication. After all, just like in real life, news quickly becomes obsolete.
Conquering districts
The aim of the game is to increase your popularity among readers by conquering new districts. Each district appreciates specific news, which is indicated by a tag showing the topic. Covering these topics will enable us to conquer new districts and gain new subscribers.
Our other goal is to beat the competition, which will also require us to try to conquer districts. When a district already has readers subscribed to our competitors, things become even more challenging. In particular, we should try to get a scoop before them. By getting news that interests their readers before the competition, we can win over our commercial rivals’ readers.
As with a real newspaper, we can decide the angle of the news, and therefore choose whether to publish a moderate, informative or scandalous newspaper. The type of rewards or penalties we receive will depend on our choices.
As the game progresses, we discover the importance of making deals with the city’s factions, such as the mafia, the mayor, high society and the police. Each time we do a favour for one faction, such as not publishing crime news, another faction will become hostile towards us. Our job is to maintain a balance between the factions and reap the benefits.
These various components make News Tower a compelling tycoon game, in which we must not only run our empire, but also fight off the competition and handle the political intrigue we find ourselves caught up in.
Our journalism empire has only just begun!
We were hooked on News Tower for several hours. At the time of writing this review, we had managed to establish a newspaper with a circulation of around 140,000 copies and we were publishing a three-page edition. The progression and difficulty are linear. Fortunately, the game never becomes too difficult or too easy. As the newspaper grows, so do the challenges.
Competitors and random events start to appear when investigating a news story, so it becomes even more important to focus on our strategy of producing higher-quality news, adding pages to our newspaper and maximising sales. In addition, we have to deal with the unexpected and continue to expand by equipping our newspaper with everything it needs, such as a security department, methods for speeding up the exchange of material in the offices using dumbwaiters and pneumatic tubes, and transportation, for example by replacing stairs with elevators.
Overall, we were very satisfied with the game, which has no obvious flaws except for the tutorials, which are often hidden by the interface and sometimes reappear even after completion.
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