As I booted up News Tower for the first time, and began to rebuild a struggling newspaper into a powerhouse of political influence, I was put in mind of Citizen Kane. The presses chugging out print, sliding papers up into the rafters; the front page headlines spinning into the screen; the factions and moguls, society climbers and mafia dons, all wanting a piece; the sheer panicked lunacy of it all, in the golden age of newspapers. It feels like the team at Sparrow Night took Orson Welles’ classic line to heart, ‘I don’t know how to run a newspaper…I just try everything I can think of.’
And there was little old me, Charles Foster Kane himself (or maybe not), about to sink or swim in the shark-infested waters of the Big Apple. I didn’t know how to run a newspaper. Or a functional business, or a tower where employees don’t want to just hurl themselves out of the top-floor windows. Or fend off the mayor’s requests for media influence. But…I just had to try everything I could think of.
I Run A Couple Of Newspapers. What Do You Do?
Thankfully, News Tower realises its entire concept is a little daunting. Tycoon games as a genre can be intimidating, with complexity often a proxy for substance. When they add time limits and deadlines and customers and employees, it can all get a bit much. News Tower kicks off with a really great and utterly necessary tutorial (wing this one at your own peril) that takes you through your first few weeks and, more importantly, your first few printed issues!
Seems your Uncle ran the paper into the ground, building up debt to mobsters and businessmen left and right, and then disappeared, possibly to Bermuda! It’s up to you to rebuild one struggling paper into a media empire. What’s left of the business now is a single-storey building in downtown New York, recently ransacked by the mafia. The harried secretary helps you through the myriad screens you are going to have to become very slick and conversant with – everything from buying appropriate reporting facilities and telegraph stations for doing the news, to the maintenance of the building itself (you need light, toilets, cleaners), and everything in between.
News Tower is a bit like two tycoon games at once – there’s the business of the news and getting a paper out each week, and then there’s the Sims-like business of running a building, with employees, supplies, and comfort needs. Let’s take each in turn, and you’ll start to really see the complexity, sorry scope, of the game.
I Don’t Know How To Run A Newspaper… I Just Try Everything I Can Think Of
So getting the newspaper out is first and foremost. You’ve got your presses and your reporters, but they don’t do much without your say-so. The telegraph workers bring in stories, which you need to assign to reporters with various strengths in themes: society, politics, crime, sport etc. Send them out and they come back with the stories, which need to be typeset and laid out in a three-stage process. Then you take over again, ordering the stories and setting them on the page for multipliers before hitting the all-important lever to print the damn thing. This is all done on a weekly basis with time to report, create the stories, and get to print.
Then the complexity ramps up a level. Stories in papers have readers and ramifications. You have to deal with factions: the mafia and the mayor, the society elites and the military. Each will ask for favours, certain stories or themes to be covered, that you need to somehow satisfy in that week’s scant ink. In addition, you’ve got to sell papers, write about things that interest your readers with each different area of the city having distinct flavours of news it likes best. You’ll earn subscribers and net higher sales. Then there are combos and multipliers to think of – satisfy all these needs and you’ll sell more, reap profit and be able to expand. Maybe buy another floor for your tower. Soon, there’s advertising space to sell, graphics and photos to add to make your publications punchy, as you start to eat up the years and enter the real meat of it.
This was the part for me, this was the story aimed at my audience. Putting together themes, reading the great headlines, managing my roster of ever more competent reporters and photographers, and getting those massive satisfying sales numbers was great fun. I would run straight into the next week with stories already in the drawer, shaping the ‘news’ for the masses in the best way, and I had a blast. What I didn’t enjoy so much, was the tower.
I Did Lose A Million Dollars Last Year. I Expect To Lose A Million Dollars This Year
Buying another floor of your tower, and filling it with 2D walls, toilets, air vents, printing presses, and then the employees themselves, is the real bustling part of the game. You can see your people going about their work, and you’ll feel like their manager very quickly. You see, they’re very Sim-like and I am not the kind of player who really gets along with Sims. News Tower has the same ‘comfort’ mechanics, where you need to manage their food, their supplies, their toilet facilities, whether it’s too cold or too hot, or too smelly, whether there’s a cleaner on every floor, etcetera etcetera, ad nauseam.
I’m the kind of player who gravitates to the narrative and so I had lots of fun with the paper itself and the reporters. What I didn’t care for was managing the building. I wanted the employees to essentially just get on with things themselves so that I could focus on the layouts. I’m clearly an editor at heart, and not an HR manager. I needed to hire an HR manager and a maintenance team to run the place.
News Tower really asks you to be everything at all levels of business, all at once, in hyper-intensive 10-15 minute blocks of panic. When things started to get more complex, I ended up getting lost in it – when we really swung out of favour with factions, sometimes they’d come and bust up the place, or sue me over a badly put together story. I needed a lawyer, and then I had to manage legal on top of everything else. Some games can start to feel like a job, and while running a news tower is of course a fantastic job, it’s also a fiercely stressful one, and News Tower the game tapped into that in a way I found too much to enjoy as the years ran on and complexities grew.
The News Goes On For Twenty-Four Hours A Day
Graphically, News Tower is pretty simple, like your first sheets sent to the presses. Everything is presented in this clip-arty but slick style, where no one has a face, just a block. It allows for putting your own imagination on everything, but it’s not the most absorbing style around. Considering the other aspects that went into the game, I could forgive them for going simple on the art.
It’s also relatively light on sound effects, but what’s there is nice and fitting. Production-wise, where News Tower shines is the incredible jazz-infused 1930s big band soundtrack. It’s been done with real instruments, with a real band, and the whole thing is fantastic. The menu music, the pieces that play through the week as you try to get your paper out the door, are upbeat and funky and just the right side of frantic too, in keeping with the vibe I got from the whole thing.
Another kind of incredible aspect is the stories themselves, the history of it all. There are 10 years’ worth of headlines in here from 1929 to 1939 – many of them real events – everything from Al Capone’s arrest and trial, to prohibition, to the politics of the lead up to World War II, and hundreds of minor stories in between. The sporting wins and losses, the advent of talkies, and the decline of the silent pictures. There is a rich feat of research in this game, which is something I can rarely talk about in a review, and while it wouldn’t have been impossible for the team to dredge through microfiche of the newspapers of the time (which I have to imagine they did), it’s still an incredible window on a lost time. That is, if you can read any of it in between worrying about the smelly toilet on level 6 and ordering paper supplies.
He Knows What’s Wrong With Every Issue Since I’ve Taken Charge
I think one of my main issues with it is probably personal. If you distil a week of work, with all its complexity and time to consider things, down into a 10-15 minute cycle of business and newspaper creation, you end up panicked. I think making all these decisions with a whole real week to do so would have me panicked, but doing it all in 15 minutes makes me almost want to throw my hands up from the keyboard and click quit.
There are two opposing forces here that both work on my anxiety in a negative fashion; one, distil a week into a 15-minute crush of decisions and management craziness; and two, increase the complexity from managing editorial to being HR, maintenance, political influencer, lawyer, and finance officer all rolled into one.
You Never Should Have Married A Newspaper Man… They’re Worse Than Sailors!
However, it’s really just a personal thing. If you’ve gravitated to News Tower and you like the style, setting, and Tycoon games anyway, you are going to have a blast because it is a fantastic example of the craft. It is substance over complexity for its own sake. Everything has a purpose and ties into this well-greased machine that just churns and churns, and you get lost in it. And if you like management games, that’s a really good thing.
Just know yourself. If it sounds like stress, it will be. A beautiful constant hedonistic whirlwind of headlines and toilets and politics and mafia demands and comfort levels. News Tower reaches the absolute heights of the tycoon genre, but it often made me want to jump from the very top.
News Tower will be available as a full release from 18th November 2025, available on PC via Steam.
Developer: Sparrow Night
Publisher: Twin Sails Interactive