theSchap's Blog

Who: Devel­oped and Pub­lished by Nim­bleBit (they sure are)
What: Sim Tower condensed

Where: Eight bit world that can only go up.

When: NOW! Free on iTuens

Why: Stack­ing pix­e­lated stores for lit­tle peo­ple to NOM NOM through is quite addict­ing for 53.6 sec­ond spurts.

What makes mobile gam­ing so pop­u­lar? Eas­ily acces­si­ble? Sim­ple to pick up? Rel­a­tively cheap? Those are all good rea­sons, but add addic­tive game­play and the abil­ity to play any­where at any­time and you have Tiny Tower. Tiny Tower can be played in under a minute at a time. If you’re wait­ing for your lunch order, you could build your own deli floor, staff it, and start gain­ing money toward your next floor.

You begin the game with a lobby as the first floor, where you go from here is up to you, as long as it’s up. I was amazed by how much the size and aspect ratio of a cell phone screen catered to a game like this. It felt nat­ural to flick up and down between the floors ensur­ing their employ­ees were busy.

Each floor can be filled with 1 of 6 dif­fer­ent busi­ness types: Food, Ser­vice, Recre­ational, Retail, Cre­ative, and Res­i­den­tial. A res­i­den­tial floor can house 5 biti­zens max. These guys pay rent, and are will­ing to work any­where within the tower. This tower is their only world, they know noth­ing out­side of it so I sup­pose they have lit­tle choice. The tower seems to have a wide vari­ety of things to do so it’s pretty all inclu­sive though I’ve never seen a bath­room. They do seem to hang out off screen to the right from time to time so maybe they take care of that over there.

Each biti­zen has  their own unique tal­ents rang­ing from 0–9 in each of the 5 busi­ness areas. Plac­ing them in a busi­ness that cor­re­sponds with their skill will reward you with faster stock­ing and over­all more coin. Plac­ing a full pro­fi­cient (9 skill) biti­zen in an accom­pa­ny­ing job will reward you with a tower buck. Tower bux can be used to expe­dite stock­ing floors, construction projects, upgrad­ing your ele­va­tor, and other things. Bux can also be gained by find­ing a lost biti­zen some­where in your tower. Mis­placed biti­zens can be fired and rehired some­where else, or if you dis­like them you can kick them out of the tower all together. Occa­sion­ally you will roll a biti­zen of all zeros and ones and it won’t feel too bad evict­ing them, but it’s easy to get attached to these lit­tle guys. They come in all sorts of dif­fer­ent fla­vors. The amount of vari­a­tion in such a lim­ited num­ber of pix­els is pretty incred­i­ble, and their envi­ron­ments look great. 8 bit graph­ics will never die.

The floors of this pocket tower are just as var­ied as their inhab­i­tants. Frozen yogurt, hat shop, com­edy club, phar­macy, cof­fee house, and many more will be con­structed at your request. Choos­ing a busi­ness type that’s in high demand, or could be stocked with some very tal­ented unem­ployed biti­zens is a gen­er­ally a good idea. These floors will take a while to be con­structed, which takes longer the higher you go, but once com­plete they are ready to be staffed with up to 3 biti­zens and 3 items or ser­vices. Stock­ing takes some time too, and it depends on the type of busi­ness you are run­ning. Mak­ing a sand­wich takes less time than build­ing hos­pi­tal for exam­ple, and each sub­se­quent item per floor takes a bit longer, but nets a higher profit so it’s best to fully staff and stock every floor.

All this time wait­ing for things to build and stock items can be part of the fun. Spe­cial char­ac­ters will show up that speed the process up and deliv­er­ing them to the desired floor via the ele­va­tor is a large part of man­ag­ing your tower. Also, with every­thing hav­ing a count­down, you can sched­ule your Tiny Tower around your day. Going to bed? Build a new floor or stock some­thing that will take all night then watch it make you money the next day. The app can eas­ily send you push noti­fi­ca­tions when some­thing needs your atten­tion so I found it fun to set sev­eral 15 minute actions at once then just wait till I was pushed a noti­fi­ca­tion. Tiny Tower inte­grates itself so well into the lulls of your day it’s hard NOT to play.

Quan­ti­ta­tive Review:

• Game­play: 8.4 - The game is very sim­ple to play, but it’s hard to tell if you are play­ing it well. Most of the enjoy­ment comes from tim­ing every­thing per­fectly so you can set up as much as pos­si­ble the next time you load up the game. You feel best when you spend the least amount of time in the actual game because you set every­thing in motion that you could. The lack of “active” game­play is made up for in the games abil­ity to fuse with almost every rou­tine dur­ing your day. Walk­ing to a meet­ing, brush­ing your teeth, cook­ing a hot pocket, and yes of course mak­ing poo.

• Visual: 9.3 — The 8 bit graph­ics strike a cer­tain chord of nos­tal­gia back to the NES days. It’s fun to see what each floor will bring and Nim­bleBit adds new and inter­est­ing biti­zens to the game from time to time. I can’t get over the hilar­i­ous “nom nom” ani­ma­tion the biti­zens make as they con­sume items on a floor.

• Sound: 8.5 -  Sound is fairly min­i­mal in this game. Most of the sounds come from alerts or UI inputs. This seems like a con­scious deci­sion as it can get a lit­tle noisy when you have 50 floors.

• Pre­sen­ta­tion: 9.8 — As I’ve said, the joy of this game lies in small bits of man­age­ment. Get­ting in, set­ting a bunch of timers, and get­ting out in less then a minute is made pos­si­ble by the quick load­ing of the app, and great in game per­for­mance. The 8 bit graph­ics and ver­ti­cal lay­out of the world make it pos­si­ble for you to scroll through a seem­ingly infi­nite num­ber of floors. I have 50 floors ren­der­ing on a iPhone 3GS and the per­for­mance is flawless.

• Inte­gra­tion: 10.0 - I can­not think of a bet­ter, more casual way for a game to inte­grate with your every­day life and I’m sure things have got­ten even bet­ter since I last played.

• Over­all: 9.2 - Between the art style, sim­ple inter­face, and abil­ity to play for sec­onds at a time I found Tiny Tower very addic­tive. The strengths of mobile gam­ing mate­ri­al­ize in Tiny Tower, and no mat­ter how busy you are day to day you down­time that could be filled with this mall like sim. Now if only they could inte­grate more mul­ti­player fea­tures, like allow­ing you to zoom into the tow­ers your friends have built. Tiny Tower is the ideal mobile game for the new wave of casual gamers.