News Tower Review – Hot Off The Press

When I played Sparrow Night’s newspaper management tycoon game, News Tower, during Early Access, it was already a very polished and enjoyable game. With its 1.0 release, News Tower brings a wider range of ways to expand your newspaper, including the use of photography, radio, illustrations, and more.

In News Tower, you are in charge of every process of printing and distributing a newspaper in the 1930s. To start off, you will need telegraphers to receive incoming reports, reporters to send out to cover these reports, and typesetters and assemblers to put the pages together. To help maintain the building and processes, you’ll also need to hire a janitor to keep the place tidy, a mechanic to keep everything in the building in working order, and supply staff to run stock to where it’s needed. Like most management sims, there is an element of time management to News Tower. It starts at the beginning of the working week, and you have until the end of the day on Sunday to source your news and set up your newspaper before it goes to print.

Your telegraphers will start picking up reports, which will be flagged on your globe, followed by an audio queue. News reports are put into several categories, for example politics, crime, and entertainment. As you progress, they’ll start to pick up sub-categories too, which describe what kind of news story it is and its tone, such as dirt, gossip, and inspiring.

Each reporter has three main categories that they specialise in, and we can build on these by assigning them to cover these categories and by also buying items to place around their desk to give these skills a boost. When a report comes through, we can assign a reporter to the story and send them out. This will take them a specific amount of time to do, usually a day, and the time it takes them to write a story will decrease the more skilled they are with that category. Sometimes, stories can split off into different angles, and this will either be an angle that we have to choose, or we’ll be given multiple angles that we can assign more than one reporter to. Covering these angles will usually add a sub-category to the finished story.

Once a story has been covered, the reporter will return to the tower and hand it in to the typsetters and assemblers, who will work on setting up the page. Before the end of the day on Sunday, you’ll need to lay out your newspaper. You’ll start with one page that will have three spaces for stories, with the opportunity to add more as you progress and purchase new printer modules. Putting stories with the same category and subcategory together on the same page will boost sales. If you don’t have enough stories to fill all of your newspaper’s pages then it won’t sell as well. You’ll also need to make sure your printer is stocked with enough paper to print enough newspaper copies to cover all of your sales, otherwise you won’t sell as many copies as you could have.

The aim of the game is to boost your sales and reader subscriptions at the end of each working week. By boosting your subscribers and sales, you’ll make more money to grow your business. There are various factions that you can work with for extra bonuses, such as the mayor, the mafia, the upper class, and the Navy. Taking offers from these factions will usually come in exchange for not printing certain categories the following week or printing a certain number of biased stories that benefit their faction. Working for one faction, such as the mafia, will affect your relationship with another, like the mayor, and if your relationship with either one decreases too much then you’ll be locked out of working with them in the future. However, you do want to stick with one side as progressing your relationship with one faction will unlock some hefty bonuses. I wasn’t the biggest fan of working with the factions, as unfortunately the majority of them are corrupt. Weirdly, the game does encourage this unethical reporting by prompting you to pick a faction mission at the beginning of each week.

You’ll want to grow your newspaper’s distribution to neighbouring districts and states. Each district offers a path to the neighbouring state, but they also come with a category requirement of what your newspaper needs to print in order to start distributing in that district. You don’t need to cover every category in one week; as long as you cover a required category once while targeting that district, then you’ll have checked it off. District paths also lead to buildings of interest, where you’ll be able to purchase items, bonuses, and resource discounts off using influence points, which you can earn by completing faction requests and by publishing certain stories.

As you expand your newspaper, you’ll unlock more employees to hire to mitigate the effects of the various events that can happen, such as lawyers to help with lawsuits and editors to take control of sloppy reporting. You can also purchase items that can boost your employee performance or production.

Building your titular news tower is a large part of managing employee performance and production. You want to make sure your employees are comfortable, which means installing items that will help reduce loud noises, smells, and high temperatures in their workplace, and upgrading facilities within the building. You’ll need to offer pay rises to boost morale, or decrease pay if your business is suffering financially. If your employees are uncomfortable and/or unhappy, then they’ll work slower and your final product will be prone to sloppy reporting, mistakes, and other negative qualities that can affect sales, especially when published together on the same page. As you keep employees on, they’ll boost their skills, develop certain traits, and grow to be more efficient and productive. As you learn the traits of your reporters, you can be more selective over who you assign to a specific story; if they’re quite resilient then they may be better to assign to a story that risks injury, and if they’re currently prone to sloppy reporting due to an uncomfortable working environment then you may want to avoid assigning them to a story until their work ethic recovers.

News Tower offers a lot of depth to the newspaper management process. Every single employee is valuable in some way, which makes it way more difficult to cut back when things start to go financially wrong. And they will go financially wrong. Unfortunately, a problem I kept running into with News Tower is ending up in that financial black hole that you can’t climb out of. The moment you make a bad financial mistake and end up with a loss, it’s incredibly difficult to work your way out of it due to one crucial element of the printing process: paper.

As mentioned before, you need to keep the printer stocked with paper. For the first few weeks, while your newspaper is limited to two pages, this won’t really be an issue. Each box order contains 50 pages, and the maximum pages you can order in one delivery is 300 for some reason. By the point my newspaper had five pages, I needed 500 pieces of paper to fulfill all of my sales. This meant having to order at least two deliveries of paper at the start of each week, 10 boxes. The supply workers aren’t very efficient at fully restocking the printer, so you have to manually drag and drop 10 boxes into the printer yourself. One by one. As your newspaper grows larger, you’ll need more paper, but the delivery limit never rises. So you have to keep ordering paper. This same paper is also used by telegraphers and for… toilet paper. So, if you run out, then not only are you unable to meet the requirements to print all the copies needed, but your telegraphers will stop working, and you won’t receive any news reports – not that this will matter anyway, as your employees will all be lined up, stuck waiting for a toilet that has run out of toilet paper. Essentially, if you run out of paper, then the entire business grinds to a halt. And if you run out of money, then you can’t buy paper, and it’s game over unless you want to risk taking out a loan. This happened to me twice. News Tower is very much a management sim where you need to have a trial game where you learn all of the mechanics, and then start over once you know what you’re doing, as one small slip-up can be very difficult to fix, because you need paper.

While the paper situation adds high stakes to resource management, I think these stakes are a little too high and take away from what should be the main focus of the game: news reporting. My priority stopped being the quality of my paper and more my desperation to scavenge enough paper from around the office at the end of the week to meet the printing requirements – much to the dismay of the employees using the bathroom when I do so. Fortunately, the paper situation is actively being worked on by the developers, who have already improved the auto-ordering mechanic and the efficiency of the supply workers.

Every choice has some form of risk. If you want to make more money, then you can print ads in your paper, but this will lower your reputation. Some stories come at the risk of injuring your reporter, protesters turning up at the door and preventing returning journalists from handing in their stories, the mafia’s goons rocking up and damaging equipment and furniture, and even lawsuits. Printing certain stories will also make your newspaper lead towards an informational tone or a sensational tone, and there will be different effects depending on what your paper is leaning towards during certain days in the calendar, which could be bonuses or negative consequences.

While you can start News Tower with a tutorial, I felt like there isn’t much support for returning players. After previously playing the game in Early Access, I didn’t feel the need to start a new game with the tutorial. But while I didn’t need a step-by-step recap of how to play the game, I did find that there’s little to no information to look back on as a quick reminder of what an item does or what you need to do when a particular event happens. This isn’t just a problem for returning players who may have forgotten the odd thing or two, but also new players who may want to refresh their memory on the barrage of information that was given to them upon first booting up the game. There’s nothing in the way of item descriptions or any form of in-game manual.

I also found that there wasn’t much information as to why employees were uncomfortable or feeling other effects. Their status will just state that they’re uncomfortable and could produce sloppy work as a result, it doesn’t specify why they’re uncomfortable. So when I review their workstation and find that it looks fine, I have no idea why they’re being affected like this.

Aesthetically, News Tower is far less busy than its gameplay, with a soft colour palette and a simple 2D art style. However, audio-wise, News Tower can be a pain. The music consists of upbeat 1930s-style tunes, and while these only play during the printing process and at the end of the week, it’s the same song over and over again, and it gets repetitive very quickly. After a few hours of playing the game, I ended up turning the music right down because of this. And while there is a sound effect for an incoming news report, other events, such as a critical resource running out or a journalist returning with a news story, don’t have any audio indication. There’s also an annoying car horn that plays during the ambient city sounds.

While News Tower does have its few flaws, I cannot fail to mention how incredibly addictive it is. Because each week goes by so quickly, it’s easy to fall into that ‘just one more week’ mindset and end up playing it for several hours longer. Even when you fail and start to lose money, there’s a drive to start over and try again, especially when all the items you can unlock in the map are there to tease you with what’s to come and how much more you could grow your business. Not to mention that it’s incredibly detailed with its management systems, which makes it a slow process to learn and understand it all, but also means there’s always an offering of new ways to improve the way your business runs and something new to learn.

Jess reviewed News Tower on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.