Review: News Tower Offers a Satisfying Newspaper Management Loop

In games where we manage a business, organization, or city, there’s always a consistent gameplay loop. We set up a situation. We let that run for a bit and hope for success. Depending on how that goes, we respond. In the best case scenarios, it’s setting a path for consistent expansion before maintaining stable success. But it can also be just as engrossing if things aren’t going as expected and we need to triage. News Tower, Sparrow Night’s newspaper management simulation, offers a near-perfect gameplay and feedback loop that encourages constant investments. 

The general premise is very simple. You’re living in New York in 1929. You get the chance to create and manage a newspaper inherited from your deceased father, deciding the direction you take and your sphere of coverage. (Yes, this means you could go moral or sensational.) This means maintaining and organizing your building and newsroom, as well as determining your sphere of coverage, revenue sources, factions you support, and range of distribution. If you do well you won’t only survive, but also best competing newspapers Empire Observer and Jersey Beacon. (Doing that nets you Lowrise and Highrise building and game modes with new challenges.) Basically, you get the opportunity to cover topics that would come up between 1930-1939 based on actual events. Maintain your office, find stories, prepare a weekly paper, see the response, invest in your office and employees, use what you learned to fine tune stories for next week, and keep learning, reporting, and hopefully succeeding.

General News Tower progression is divided into two parts. One involves building layout and management. You can purchase floors, place staircases, a generator, and lights, set up a research section with things like telegraphing stations and reporter desks, a text area with assembly tables and typesetting desks, and setting up a printer with input and output modules, belts, and a printer page module. There are also elements to help increase comfort, divisions, and efficiency, like a bathroom, pneumatic tubes, elevators instead of stairs, comfort elements, and walls to further set up divisions. But there’s a lot of getting things set up, then hiring people to manage them. 

Now, this part is incredibly enjoyable, but it also is an element that I found I didn’t engage with as often as I did the actual newspaper management. Setting up a building to ensure everything flows together, there’s efficient movement between stations, and people can get around matters! I did find I’d need to tweak and adjust things, especially as the paper and building grew. But that actual setup part doesn’t seem to come up as frequently as other management elements.

Which may be for the best! There are a lot of management elements in News Tower, such as keeping an eye on staff, making decisions about news coverage, trying to improve circulation, balance faction requests, and deal with malicious attempts to hamper your success. When we start a game, we can hire reporters who focus on crime, the economy, entertainment, politics, society, sports, and world news. We invest in people to improve them, but also need to take care when sending journalists on assignments as they could end up injured. You wait for ideas to come in on the telegraph. When a story possibly comes up, you need to go through different parts and assign a person to work it. Skill points can dictate how fast progress goes. The number of printer page presses you have determine how many stories you can do, with one page having room for three stories. The meat of it comes from assigning stories, having staff move things from one section to another, and prepare to put out your Sunday papers. Though, from what I’ve seen, a little extra micromanagement to ensure priority stories are staff’s main focus and manually moving some elements along is better than leaving folks to their own devices. 

I mentioned earlier that you can decide how you cover things. News Tower lets you choose between lies and the truth. You can be practical and honest, or try and lean toward clickbait sorts of situations. These elements can affect popularity and public response. (As can things like pricing.) It also determines whether you’ll catch the attention of different factions.

Which plays into the hazards that can come up in News Tower. Issues like smells from a bathroom or sound could be a problem, requiring acoustic panels, walls, and sinks. The printing press is a mechanical monster that’s hot, noisy, and generally unpleasant, so building layouts need to take that into account to ensure people are comfortable enough to actually work. Because if people aren’t happy, they won’t perform. Factions might be unhappy with your coverage choices. (You know, reporting the truth.) This could lead to members of the military or criminal organizations coming in with threats or bribes. Spies can come in to damage equipment. It feels like there’s never enough money, which means taking out loans. 

Given how much is happening at once, that News Tower works so well is a testament to Sparrow Night’s work. However, I found that can make it especially noticeable when something doesn’t work exactly right or is a little unbalanced. The UI is a bit cluttered and sometimes isn’t as intuitive as you’d expect for all the information coming in at any time. I got used to it, but it’s a bit to take in when you start. Also, while moral and quality decisions come up, I felt like the simulation didn’t go far enough to reward or penalize these kinds of actions and decisions. While going bankrupt is a threat and there are rivals, it’s pretty easy to work out how to get ad opportunities and the other papers aren’t a genuine threat. Which meant after about 10 to 15 hours or when you are in your second or third run, it might not feel as thrilling. (But even then, it taking that long to start feeling “routine” is pretty good!) I encountered an array of bugs as well, but found the issues with staff intelligence and minor problems seem to be covered in Sparrow Night’s patches, so I’m pretty sure they’ll be squashed in the next few weeks and months. 

News Tower is a satisfying business management simulation that involves optimizing offices and reporting procedures to ensure success. It feels like there’s are opportunities to keep investing and growing. It can even be so satisfying that it stays compelling for hours. There are some minor issues and sometimes it might feel a bit too easy or routine when you get used to things, but I still very much recommend it.

News Tower is available on PCs, and there is a demo on Steam.