News Tower

An exceptional newspaper management game that transforms complex interlocking systems into endlessly engaging weekly puzzles through brilliant design and pacing.

Introduction

News Tower is a newspaper tycoon game set in 1930s New York where you manage a growing newspaper building handed down from your uncle. You'll find yourself adding floors to this ever-growing tower, hiring staff and building their stations, managing their needs while limiting distractions like noise, smell, and heat. The game masterfully combines many layers to turn the simple objective of publishing a weekly newspaper into a complex system with an ever-growing set of mechanics. Every week becomes a new management puzzle that you and your team need to solve, making this one of the best and most unique tycoon games in the genre.

The Weekly Loop

The game is split into weeks where your goal is to gather reports and put together a newspaper to distribute on Sunday. You have three main staff categories with randomized skills. Reporters specialize in things like crime, sports, politics, or photography. Production staff handle typesetting, sales, and even legal work. Utilities maintain the tower with skills like repairs, cleaning, and security.

Telegraphers pick up news from the outside world, and you dispatch reporters on a map to cover these stories. Each report can evolve and introduce obstacles, with rewards or penalties based on the path you take. The report then needs to go through the typesetting desk and assembly desk before it's ready for print on Sunday. That's the simplest version of the loop, but the game builds so much more on top of this foundation.

Systems Upon Systems

The amount of systems and mechanics this game balances is outstanding. The game evolves with more obstacles and occupations like sales staff drafting ads, illustrators, cartographers, and photographers with their own complete production lines. The photography chain in particular felt overkill to me, even if it's realistic. It just added complexity that slowed things down more than it enriched the experience.

On top of production, the game has a complete other layer with the map of New York and your influence throughout it. You can target districts interested in specific types of news to gain subscribers. The more you expand on the map, the more buildings you unlock, which let you spend influence points to get upgrades and blueprints for all sorts of tower improvements that boost production, unlock new skills, or make your workers' lives easier.

Factions and Competition

The game brings in two pairs of factions: Mayor/Mafia and High Society/General. Each offers weekly quests, and gaining standing with one faction usually means losing favor with their opposite. This creates fun weighing of pros and cons since each faction offers unique unlocks as you gain favor. It's very hard if not impossible to please everyone, so you need to choose wisely.

Another really cool system is fighting for districts against two competing newspapers. This brings a competitive spin to the news reporting and dispatch system. Now you have to watch for specific reports where you need to compete and try to beat the other papers to get the scoop. This added a whole other level of enjoyment, and I found myself paying close attention to the production line and sometimes micromanaging the team so a piece could make it into this week's edition.

The Sunday Puzzle

Building the newspaper itself each Sunday is probably the part I enjoyed most. You manage tags to make sure you're printing what your target district wants to read while also completing active faction quests that might require specific tags or avoiding others. Add the tag multiplier system on top and you have a fully engaging puzzle every single week.

This became even more enjoyable with the addition of the perception system in the early to mid game. Some reports shift the newspaper's perception to the right or left for that week if placed in a specific section. This made the puzzle even more engaging because the perception axis also had weekly rewards and penalties. You needed to move left, right, or stay center to collect or avoid these weekly events. This is just masterful game design where you take a really fun system and keep building on it to increase the enjoyment tenfold.

Tutorial Excellence

With so many interlocking systems, you might think the game would be overwhelming. But if there's one thing that impressed me more than the systems themselves, it's the amazing tutorial. Tycoon games usually suffer from being overcomplicated with simple tutorials and then a sudden complexity spike that overwhelms most players looking for a casual experience. News Tower has an amazing tutorial with a very gentle learning curve that's not too hand-holdy and doesn't throw you in the deep end. It guides you when a new system is introduced and then fades to the background until you need it again.

Minor Frustrations

The UI was a bit confusing at first, but I quickly got used to it. It's very tactile and fitting for the time period. There are some quality of life things I hope get added later. For example, you can't swap two desks by dragging one over another. You have to use an open space or the stash to do it, which feels unnecessarily clunky. I also wish there was a way to see next week's perception events while in the transitional screen at the end of the week. That's when you picked faction quests, and some factions asked for a right or left leaning edition. Not seeing next week's events made it slightly annoying to plan.

The photography production line was just too slow, especially early on when first unlocked. Too many pieces in the chain meant that even reports I got on Tuesday sometimes didn't make it to Sunday even though they were prioritized. That was frustrating, and the space, equipment, and staff salary investment never felt worth it, but I needed it to beat some contested districts.

I wish the game was more generous with influence points. I was always bottlenecked with a very long wishlist of things I wanted to unlock. I understand it's a way to control progress, but with how many blueprints and upgrades you had available to purchase, it felt frustrating when gaining points was much slower than the rate at which interesting options appeared.

Verdict

News Tower is an exceptional tycoon game that proves complex systems can be accessible when designed thoughtfully. The way it layers mechanics on top of each other creates an experience that never feels dull across almost 30 hours of gameplay. The weekly newspaper building puzzle, combined with faction politics and competitive district battles, makes every Sunday feel like a unique challenge to solve. The jazz soundtrack is a masterpiece that perfectly captures the 1930s atmosphere and never gets old. Yes, the photography production line is frustratingly slow, and influence points feel too scarce for the sheer number of unlocks available. A few quality of life improvements would smooth out the experience. But these are minor complaints in a game that otherwise nails what it's trying to do. The tutorial alone sets a new standard for the genre. This is easily one of the best and most unique tycoon games available, and I can't recommend it enough to fans of management games.