News Tower
Last updated: 2025-11-20
- Highly polished and addictive experience.
- Comprehensive newspaper management gameplay.
- Accessible mechanics with deep progression.
- Captivating 1930s aesthetics and sound.
- Mid-late game becomes repetitive and shallow.
- Inadequate language support; poor, unskippable tutorials.
Emotions
Players feel satisfied due to the game's overall high quality, unique design, and continuous improvements, especially after its 1.0 release or during Early Access. This includes engaging gameplay loops, smart mechanics, deep simulation, excellent graphics, music, and responsive developer support, creating a polished and addictive experience.
Enjoyment stems from the game's fun and addictive nature, often leading to losing track of time. Players appreciate the engaging management simulation, historical accuracy, creative elements like headlines, and the appealing atmosphere and music, providing a relaxing yet captivating experience.
Excitement is driven by anticipation for future content updates, the full 1.0 release, and new features like language support or gameplay modes. Players are thrilled by the innovative design, strategic depth, and the game's continuous evolution, which promises even more engaging and challenging experiences.
Frustration arises from the game's grindy nature, excessive micromanagement, and quality-of-life issues like clumsy UI or inefficient NPC AI. Players are also bothered by unclear objectives, difficulties with building redesigns, and the lack of crucial features such as proper localization or an 'unlock-all' option, especially in the early game.
Players eagerly await future updates, new content, and the full release of the game, hoping for added features, plot lines, and design options. There is a strong desire for enhanced language support and overall refinement to address current issues and fulfill the game's potential.
Verdict
Mostly positive
Summary
Positive 90% · Negative 10%. Score: 10 / 100
Positives:
- The game receives widespread acclaim for being an exceptionally fun, unique, and polished management simulation, even in Early Access. Its highly addictive "just one more turn" gameplay loop effectively hooks players for extended periods, providing immense replay value and consistently exceeding expectations.
- The game boasts well-designed mechanics that are easy to grasp yet offer surprising depth, with complexity introduced gradually to prevent player overwhelm. Its rewarding progression system, combined with continuous objectives and high replayability, ensures a consistently engaging gameplay experience.
- The game's 1930s New York setting is vividly rendered through its appealing art style, charming visuals, and an outstanding jazz-infused soundtrack. This cohesive and period-appropriate aesthetic, from pixel art to immersive music, significantly enhances player immersion and overall enjoyment.
- Reviewers frequently commend the game's exceptional quality and rich content even during Early Access, noting it often feels more complete than many full releases. The developers are highly praised for their active involvement, transparent roadmap, frequent updates, and responsiveness to community feedback, demonstrating a strong commitment to continuous improvement.
- The core idea of the game is frequently praised as interesting, novel, and ingenious, distinguishing it within its genre. Players recognize its significant potential for future growth and the expansion of features, looking forward to its continued development and enhanced enjoyment.
Negatives:
- A predominant complaint is that the game quickly becomes repetitive and grindy, especially in the mid-to-late game, leading to player boredom and a lack of motivation. Players feel there isn't enough depth, new content, or strategic challenge to sustain engagement beyond the initial hours, making the experience feel short or incomplete for its price point.
- A significant number of players from various regions report a critical lack of comprehensive language localization, particularly for Chinese, Spanish, French, Italian, and Russian. This barrier prevents non-English speakers from fully understanding game mechanics, news content, and overall immersion.
- The tutorial system is widely criticized for being intrusive, unskippable, and poorly explained, often forcing players through repetitive content even on subsequent playthroughs. This makes new game starts frustrating and often requires players to seek external resources to understand mechanics.
- Players report a mixed experience with difficulty, describing it as both overly difficult or complex in some areas (e.g., challenge spikes) and absurdly easy or lacking challenge in others. The introduction of mechanics can also be overwhelming, impacting the learning curve and overall pacing.
- Many players find the core newspaper production and office management mechanics to be overly manual, repetitive, and tedious. Tasks such as adjusting layouts, moving items, and assigning reporters often lack proper automation or streamlined tools, detracting from the strategic experience.
Gameplay:
- Players engage in detailed newspaper management, encompassing staff hiring (reporters, editors), story assignments, layout design, financial balancing, and editorial decisions. The game simulates building a news empire in 1930s New York, requiring strategic planning and resource allocation to expand influence and readership.
- Players begin with limited space and must strategically expand their newspaper building floor by floor, customizing rooms and layouts for maximum efficiency. Managing space constraints and optimizing employee placement within the growing tower is a key gameplay element.
- The Early Access version provides approximately 10-20 hours of campaign gameplay, complemented by an endless mode for extended engagement. Reviewers frequently mentioned playing through the game multiple times to optimize strategies or experience different outcomes.
- The game introduces a lot of information early on, leading to a significant learning curve, especially after the initial tutorial. Many players found subsequent playthroughs essential to fully grasp mechanics and effectively strategize from the outset, as the difficulty quickly ramps up.
- A core progression system revolves around "Influence Points," which players earn and spend to unlock vital upgrades, new equipment, additional staff roles (like photographers), and expand their operational reach across the city map. This system directly fuels the growth and capabilities of the newspaper empire.
Performance:
- Players consistently report that the game runs very smoothly across various platforms like PC, Steam Deck, and MacOS, with minimal to no bugs even in late-game scenarios. This indicates a high level of optimization and stability, contributing positively to the player experience.
- Some players experienced noticeable latency and progressively slower loading times as they advanced further in the game. This suggests potential optimization issues that emerge during extended play or late-game content.
- One player encountered a specific interaction bug that was easily resolved by simply restarting the game. This suggests it might be an infrequent or minor issue that doesn't severely impact the overall experience.
- Players noted occasional frame rate dips; however, these were not constant and did not negatively impact the gameplay experience. This suggests the performance generally remains stable despite minor, intermittent fluctuations.
Recommendations:
- Players overwhelmingly recommend the game, often giving it high ratings even in Early Access. Many consider it a must-buy, praising its potential and current enjoyment, and eagerly look forward to its full release and future updates.
- The game is strongly recommended for enthusiasts of management, tycoon, and simulation genres. It is often compared positively to titles like SimTower or Game Dev Tycoon, appealing to players who enjoy strategic building and decision-making.
- Some players experienced significant frustration due to specific bugs in the scheduling system and mission mechanics, leading to refunds or a temporary refusal to recommend. They indicate a strong desire for these issues to be resolved for a better experience.
- The game is recommended for players seeking a chill, relaxing, and mildly distracting experience. It's suitable for those who enjoy peaceful challenges and simple logistics without intense stress.
- News Tower is praised as a unique and memorable adventure, with reviewers finding it genuinely engaging even in its Early Access state. Some players are making an exception to follow its development despite not usually engaging with early access games.
Miscellaneous:
- Players are highly enthusiastic about the upcoming 1.0 release, future content updates, and potential DLC. Many have followed the game since Early Access, are saving their playthroughs, and are excited to see the game evolve according to the roadmap.
- There is a strong and widespread demand for more language options, particularly Chinese, Russian, and French, but also Korean, Ukrainian, Turkish, and Italian. Players believe full localization is crucial for immersion and wider accessibility, with some waiting for translations before playing extensively.
- Players seek various quality-of-life improvements like easier layout adjustments, options to skip tutorials, and more building/furniture options for the tower. They also want expanded news handling areas and features like a 'Hall of Fame' for best front-page stories and special edition prints.
- Players desire more interactive sandbox elements, such as making 'Mayor' and 'Mafia' storylines more gameplay-relevant beyond quests, and the ability to influence society. There are also requests for an endless mode, tower decoration, and competitive elements like rival newspapers or being part of a chain.
- Reviewers generally find the game decent and acknowledge its potential for improvement, especially given its Early Access status. They hope for continued development to deepen the gameplay experience.
