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Review: Tiny Tower

WARNING: Do not play this game if you have an addictive personality or obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

If only someone had warned me before I got in over my head. Tiny Tower starts off innocently enough, introducing you to the key concepts of the game: building floors in your tower, comprised of various business and apartments; then, staffing the businesses with the apartment residents; and finally, looking after each of the businesses’ stock levels. All the while, you’re ferrying visitors up from the lobby to whichever floor they wish to go to. Sounds easy enough.

Then you start trying to align residents with their dream jobs, or at least one’s they’re good at. You have a little tantrum because you don’t want to evict D. Douglas even though he’s crap – but he has an awesome beard and a pirate hat! You’re playing just a few more minutes in case that all-important construction worker VIP might come to shave 3 hours off your ninth floor of residential apartments. The iPad is being kept close-by while you’re at a dinner party because the Mapple Store is expecting its next shipment of MyPhones and you want to restock right away. Of course, none of these have happened to me…

Tiny Tower could be described as an intellectual cross between Sim Tower and Game Dev Story. It falls under the banner of free-to-play games that you can ‘enhance’ using real money (I will only use the word Freemium here in parentheses because it’s a stupid portmanteau). Buying “Tower Bux” only does one thing though, and that’s taking away the challenge and the fun of the game. It doesn’t give you anything that you can’t get through a bit of perseverance in-game.

The cute, pixellated style and simple, addictive gameplay really get you hooked in quickly. There are 5 types of businesses: food, service, retail, creative, and entertainment, in which every Bitizen has a varying degree of talent towards. The higher their number in that area, the cheaper it is to restock the shop. Up to 3 Bitizens can work in each shop, where you may stock as many items as you have staff. Each Bitizen also has a dream job, which will earn you a tidy 3 Bux and the ability to stock twice as many of an item.

The gameplay is essentially random. Non-resident Bitizens buy things from your businesses automatically. Several times a minute, a guest will appear in the elevator lobby who you deliver personally to a floor (also determined randomly). VIPs also appear granting different bonuses from decreasing stocking time to increasing customer flow for a bit. Bux are awarded sporadically for delivering guests to their floor and for infrequent find-a-Bitizen missions – easy when you start and know them all by name, but more frustrating at higher levels.


So, what keeps you playing? Half of it is that the game keeps playing even when you’re not. Tiny Tower runs in real time, with the businesses continuing to sell and restock continually. When the staff are ready to stock an item, by default you will get a notification reminding you to check back on your tower. Additionally, it’s that drive for just one more level…or, just until this shop restocks…or, 5 more Bux…which is a credit to the charm that NimbleBit have injected into the game. There’s a lot of tongue-in-cheek humour, obviously visible with the inclusion of BitBook – status updates from your Tiny Tower residents. Game Centre integration also adds the competitive element since you can have a peek at your friend’s towers and see what they’re doing and how you might be able to best them.
I have very few issues with this game. Especially as a free game, there isn’t much to complain about. I would like to see the Bitizen roster able to be sorted as it does get unwieldy once you’ve got more than about 20 residents. There have also been reports of crashes when a lot of items are ready to be restocked. I’ve seen this first hand on my housemate’s iPad, but haven’t had any problems personally on an iPad 2.

Tiny Tower is solid free game. It’s simple, cute and appeals to the obsessive-compulsive inside all of us. It’s available right now on iTunes for iPhone and iPad.

Update: Since I wrote this review, NimbleBit have fixed the only thing that made the game cumbersome to me and added a few extra nifty features! Tiny Tower now offers the ability to sort bitizens by happiness level (useful for working out who’s employed and who’s not), as well as their skill in each business type.

Each level in your tower can now be renamed to whatever you like. This leads to much hilarity discovering what your friends are renaming their businesses to. The winner in my mind is Stevivor.com’s own Jasper, a master of the pun, with such gems as “Hire Ground” the video store and the cake studio with the appellation “Cake Blanchett”, which makes me snigger every time!

In addition, there’s been a couple of minor changes that really improve the flow of the game, such as removing interstitial notification screens when restocking, and an improved chance of earning tower bux when delivering bitizens to the appropriate floor. Also, I haven’t seen any reports of random app crashes anymore, on any platform. Good work, NimbleBit!

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