One day I hope to review a game called Tiny tower: Blackpool. You’d be able to stir in some really unique mechanics and aesthetics. Think of the gameplay opportunities:
- Upgrade lamp posts with modern sculpture illumination to provide the local seagulls with somewhere classy to shit
- Entice stag/hen parties to keep irritating families away
- Install blue/UV lighting in public toilets to deter heroin addicts from mugging stags and hens
- Discard all town waste into the sea, nobody will notice the difference and you’ll save a lot of cash
- Repaint the tower to commemorate something, it’ll take a few years and cost a fortune but it will look slightly different so it’s worth it
Just a few ideas.
Instead of that realism you’re encouraged to create a Vegas casino to entice tiny plebs to spend money. Snoozepocalypse.
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Construction of your tower isn’t particularly engaging. The tiny gamblers spend their virtual life savings and booze money at your casino and you use that money to buy new floors and fruit peddlers to entice gullible punters. Outside of commissioning new floors your duties extend to restocking and acting as a bellboy to your guests, ferrying them between floors for tips. I suppose that’s a mechanic in that you perform an action and something happens. It does seem a little half-arsed considering people often demand to be taken to floors which are still under construction.
What little gameplay there is, is dragged out between purchases. You ordered a floor to be built? 60 minute timer until it’s done. You ordered more fruit? 10 minute timer. It’s like playing Theme park except you can only build one thing every 30 minutes and the only thing you’re trusted to control is the price of the fries. Obviously, this is a free game so you can opt to speed construction up with “bucks” but these accrue slowly without paying real money for them. You can’t do that though, that means that the terrorists have won.
The pay-to-do-things-now business model ruins the entire pace of the game. Management games like Theme Hospital and Rollercoaster Tycoon got it right because you’re never waiting, you’re actively trying to manage payroll, customer happiness, profits, entertainment, cleaning, safety, finance and geography. You’re very rarely short on things to actually do or get involved in. Even if you’re some kind of sadist who creates rollercoasters that end in nothing but death.
Conversely, Tiny tower leaves you with nothing to adjust or alter or tinker with. There’s no managing or … fun. You simply build things, then wait until you’re bored enough to return to the game and build more.
If I were Blackpool council I’d catapult this giant turd into the local drinking supply where it belongs.
Games Whinge 