Tower Of Power
HIGH Addicting play loop. Excellent period music.
LOW Readability issues. Some elements seem too random.
WTF Why is the Mafia so mean to me? : (
Having devoured Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket last month (it’s excellent, of course, you should read it, of course) I’ve been thinking that early 20th century America gets short shrift in terms of artistic representation. I’m talking about, say, 1900 – 1938.
World War I ushered in an armada of modern horrors and casts a long historical shadow, but it’s a murky, chimerical conflict — it doesn’t have the obvious Good vs. Evil resonances of World War II. The Depression is, well, depressing, and being an economic and societal failure, it’s inherently less sexy and marketable to the masses. Not to mention, also, the awkward fact that we’ve learned little, if anything, from it. Worst of all, the vibrant music of the era has been co-opted into that most aberrant of modern pseudo-genre slop, electroswing.
Things really aren’t any better in the gaming scene. There aren’t any heavy hitters – across any genre – that truly embrace the era. None that I know of, at least. However, this could change with the 1.0 release of News Tower, a sweet and compelling strategy hybrid of colony manager and tycoon game whose mechanics put players into a vanished (but still relevant) place and time.
News Tower presents players with a side-on, ant colony-style view of a tower – initially squat and lowly, eventually grand and bustling – in which, believe it or not, news will be made. That means finding stories via telegraph, sending out reporters, typesetting their articles, and arranging them for production. All of this takes time – a lot of it, actually – with the Sunday print deadline always looming like a war-zeppelin on the horizon. Every story comes with content tags – crime, drama, sports, many more – and publishing multiple stories with the same tags gives big boosts to sales and subscribers.
When talking about mechanics-laden games, there’s always the risk of simply listing all the different mechanics, so to avoid that just know this is an interdisciplinary strategy experience, both macro and micro, demanding equal playerly attention to the high drama of Scoop Pursuit, as well as to the granular fiddliness of deciding where exactly on each reporter’s desk a fern plant should be placed to keep them happy. The primary sensation that News Tower evokes is of spinning about a dozen plates while standing on one foot, like some kind of big-top circus sideshow between the headliners.
These concerns converge like a swarm of militant hornets on the ol’ brainpan, and, while it is overwhelming in a way, it also creates an impressively compelling gameplay loop that slaps iron shackles on a player’s focus. Like many of the greats in the strategy space, it’s hard to find a good stopping place for a play session: there’s always something that needs attention, another goal to pursue, a new variety of potted plant to place tastefully upon a disgruntled employee’s desk.
It ain’t all sunshine and roses in the big city, though. The biggest musca domestica in the otherwise unctuous News Tower ointment is the UI and general visual clarity. Each reporter has three types of story they can cover, each with its own related icon. I’d like some additional visual cueing on the reporters, because it’s hard to remember who does what in the heat of a busy newsweek. This isn’t like X-COM, where each member of the team has a pronounced identity and specialty — even a small newsroom will have four or six reporters, all relatively anonymous in their matching fedorae and mackintosh coats.
Knowing exactly when a story will be ready to print, probably the most crucial thing to keep track of, is also harder to find than it should be. It’s easy to know when an individual step in the publishing process will be done, but the actual Ready-to-Print time is hidden away in a tooltip in a sub-menu. This means that unless a player does a lot of preparatory menu-perusing, it’s easy to queue up a story and discover it won’t be ready in time for Sunday. It’s frustrating.
There’s also just a damn lot to look after, dozens of menus and buttons and tabs – so much of it important at some point or another. The tutorial is actually a scripted campaign, and it does a good job highlighting a portion of this stuff (but not all of it) and not everybody is going to be down with a tutorial that can take longer than some whole games take to complete. After a few hours I dipped out and jumped into the deep end of the classic mode.
I want to end on a high note, though, so I’m going to return to the question of theming. A lot of management titles can have a sort of Excellian abstractness to them — a whiff of spreadsheet seeping out around their ostensible settings. Not so with News Tower. No, it evokes the golden age of paper news across its entire mechanical suite, bolstered further by an absolutely wonderful, period-appropriate live jazz soundtrack from Dutch ensemble New Cool Collective. To quote legendary schlock-peddler, Xanadu denizen, and all around freak William Randolph Hearst — it’s immersive as hell.
And from me? It’s an enthusiastic recommend.
Score: 8 out of 10
Disclosures: This game is developed by Sparrow Night and published by Twin Sails Interactive. It is available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 20 hours of play were devoted to the game, and it was not completed. There are no multiplayer modes.
Parents: This game is not yet rated by the ESRB. Obviously, a lot of the stories that crop up (many based on real historical facts) concern tragic events, and municipal corruption plays a big part. It’s all handled with a cartoony, light touch, however — lighter than what any kid would see on any news site or social media app on any given day. Not sure if younger gamers would cotton to the theme but, if they do, there isn’t anything here to worry about.
Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes present.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All of the dialogue is text-based, but it, as well as the menu text, cannot be resized. (See in-game examples above) An important sound cue occurs whenever a story comes in on the telegraph. It’s accompanied by an icon on the menu screen, but it’s a pretty small icon. Other than that, all important events are conveyed visually.
Remappable Controls: The game supports keyboard + mouse, but not controller. The keyboard controls are fully remappable.
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Great review! It sounds like “Tower Of Power” has some really engaging gameplay and a fun soundtrack. It’s always interesting to see how different elements come together in a game. Looking forward to hearing more about it!