Breaking news! Becoming a publisher and establishing your own newspaper business increases happiness, News Tower reports.
Building a business from the ground up is never easy; things might even be worse if the owner has left the company in shambles and is on the verge of death. I feel like if it’s a restaurant business or a repair shop, then there is some chance of it being revived swiftly with some great management.
Still, if it is a business that depends on high coordination and some bit of luck, then it requires a lot of experience in management to pull that business back to its full power. One simple example of such businesses is newspapers and publishing, which are struggling to be relevant in the current day and age.
But what if we were to rewind time to around 100 years ago when the Industrial Revolution was fully established, and the spread of information could be done in a few days of work? Well, newspapers of the old age required a lot of care to be put in, with all reporters coming up with articles every week, editors suiting the said articles for reading, and printers finalizing the newspaper. It was a hefty line of work and the profit you made barely covered your monthly expenses, so it was hard to maintain a highly grossing publishing business.
No matter, it was at least a booming market with constant customers and a thriving economy. It was one of the topics that didn’t interest me. Still, with News Tower in my library, now I can understand the journalism business was tough to get around, not to mention keep it afloat with competitors and possible dangerous elements in the outside world.
News Tower is a title where you have to get your deceased dad’s newspaper back to business by being the newspaper’s new publisher. Of course, it doesn’t start in a harsher environment where you are immediately tasked to make excessive profits. Once you land on what’s left of the newspaper business your dad owned, the lady in the building starts giving you a nice tutorial on what to do next.
These include preparing the newspaper for a week and hiring journalists, printers, technicians, and mechanics. As I said earlier, not everything is as easy in the 1930s printing market; every bit of action takes staffing, and you are assigned to find people to hire.
Once you find the in-house editors and printmakers, you are out of your way to find journalists who’ll cover great deals of news all around the globe. However, your first field of work will be mostly North America, thanks to its natural habitat, which is filled with lots of usual and unusual stories to cover worldwide.
If you plan to expand overseas in News Tower, you don’t have to worry about it. As you keep playing through, you’ll get to unlock Europe, Asia, and even South America to cover the news from those continents, too, but the drawback is sending your reporters on longer journeys.
Just to let you know, I am not great with strategy games, and I often find myself being confused about what to do once the AI starts turning on the aggressive mode, but News Tower was lighthearted enough to let me play through more than an hour with no fails whatsoever. Thanks to its pacing, getting everything sorted, and financially covering myself to keep the business working, News Tower can be a great starter for people who want to dive into strategy games with management involved.
To continue what News Tower offers, its sole goal is to print out newspapers weekly to gain profits. You are given exactly one week to print out one newspaper on Sundays, which is odd because that’s how newspapers usually were published. Instead of newspapers being a daily way to find out about the whole country or world, people used to wait to hear about everything on Sunday instead. During the week of research and gathering information, you first have to send your journalists to certain places to get proper coverage.
Once your reporter is on the field, it takes a few days for them to return and then give the coverage to the editor, which then turns into an article, then it’s sent to the printer who finalizes how it will appear on the newspaper. This whole event takes a few days to complete, so you have to act fast before the news becomes obsolete, which then drops the rating of your newspaper in the end.
I absolutely adore the realism put into News Tower as it portrays the actual business motives of newspaper publishing during the early ages. You always have to keep an eye on your employees and keep them motivated in order to get better results on the articles. After all, your building is an ecosystem of its own, and you have to keep it healthy so that nothing fails at a crucial time.
Talking about realism, let’s talk about the thing that caught me off guard and made me go, “There is no way they have News Tower that could reach the matter in this sort of realism.” One shocker was the mental stability of the workers. From my experience, working in a loud environment while writing or brainstorming can be annoying and easily lead to me making an absolute mess of an article.
I sincerely apologize if you have come across one. I can assure you it is definitely not something I have done in a serene environment. My failed articles aside, the same thing can happen to your employees, too. Noise, no air, and even smells can put editors and writers out of commission and lead to half-assed articles, which can hurt your profit.
Since you are building your residence, hence the name tower in the title, you can easily build up new flats as you keep earning profits, that way you can separate your workers from spaces that threaten them to become less and less inclined to work. For example, once you get your printer out of commission, you build a faster and more advanced printer on the second floor.
Although the change of pace is great, it creates a lot of noise and heat, which is a big no-no for a work environment. To combat that, you can build walls or noise ventilation to give a better room for your workers, which I thought was a neat mechanic.
A week passes quickly in News Tower, but it is moderate enough to let you manage your overall business stance and workflow. The week starts by choosing a district to specialize in; since the game takes place in the heart of the USA, the three states of Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey are first you’ll prioritize your work. After choosing a district, you might come across unpassable requests from the mafia or gangs of a certain place to focus on certain news or completely disregard some of them.
For example, the mafia could potentially want you to disregard political news for a week for an extra payout or avoid news that has anything related to the mafia in it. Districts, on the other hand, love specified news, which is an incentive to find articles that the district is more likely to read.
The reward of handpicking your news articles and publishing them accordingly gives you an extra payout by those sources and potentially gets your name out of there even more. The rivalry between different publishing agencies does not exist in News Tower; therefore, having your plan to make your newspaper is always viable no matter which path you want to take.
After a week of research, sending journalists out, and getting your workers in the exact position, it is time to print the newspaper. At the end of the week, you usually have a few articles to publish on your bank, and you can opt to choose whichever story you like, but as expected, it’s better if you optimize the payout once again.
Like in real life, in News Tower some articles can be old news by the time you print them out, so it’s best to avoid the old news. The same is true of sloppy writing caused by the terrible office environment. People always demand unbiased and proper writing, so you must arrange the best possible outcome.
The page design in your first few months will be only the addition of big news followed up by two substories; however, as time goes on, you can start printing more and more pages, allowing you to add more stories and potentially gain more profits, too. Later, you can get subscribers and even spaces for ads, which we got used to seeing in real life.
The realism, again, is superb, and I am super glad the developers have thought of everything with the mentality of the 1930’s publishing business. I feel like this is the entire reason why News Tower could be separated from other management games on the market.
Talking about realism, in News Tower, if you want to profit from the management you put into, you must care about all the staff dealing with journalism and editing. Once you hire someone, they start getting more and more experience, just in real life, and through their experience in covering news, they get accustomed to certain types of news more than others.
In the beginning, assigning a random journalist to a case does not matter, but if the journalist gets a hold of a certain topic, say politics or sports, it’s always best to get them to work on the same topic for a faster research and development time of the story.
So far, I have praised News Tower for its realism and the showcase of the brutal behind-the-scenes publishing business, even if it’s far from what we have to deal with these days. The UI is clean, the pacing is completely even, and it is not another city builder and management game with the premise of attacking other villages to grow bigger.
But there are some points where News Tower could potentially work out better during its early access hours. My problems were the shortage of money and how it flew away as soon as profits started rolling.
Maybe there is some underlying reality that the publishing business had no proper profit motive behind it back in the day, but I reckon this is not the case as I sometimes struggled to keep supplies while trying to maintain everyone’s wages, plus a likable newspaper that sold adequately. So, the money is always tight, and throwing a little bone to players could potentially give them the feeling that it’s not all hopeless.
There is also the fact that the UI, despite being designed well, is always cluttered with something, always all the time. I understand it’s a management game with lots of little tidbits. Still, once every mechanic is pointed out, you have to check if everything is under control.
It slowly becomes a chore to go through all the menus and take a look at your tower. Sometimes, you might just miss the time to print on Sundays due to being extremely busy, which hurts your profits altogether.
Overall, the vibes of News Tower were more lenient towards being a proper manager at your publishing company rather than being a rookie at your job and not understanding what the next move could be. As you progress through the ladder of competency, you start to understand how to maximize everything.
At the same time, you start sailing upwards through the ranks, conquering the most populated area of the USA and the rest of the world. If you are looking for a management and strategy title that is not a medieval city builder with the same concepts used repeatedly, News Tower is the right title for you to try.
