App A Day: Tiny Tower
Do you remember when you were younger, there used to be a game called SimTower? Today we bring you another free game for your iDevice called Tiny Tower which is kind of a remake of the older game. Tiny Tower lets you build a tiny tower and manage the businesses and bitizens that inhabit it. The objective is to build the highest most revenue generating tower that you can.
The game starts out very simply. You have a lobby on which you have to construct a new floor. You start with a simple residential floor. It can hold 5 “Bitizens” who pay you rent every day and work for you in your tower. Once your residential floor is completed, you can build your first business!
All businesses require employees. While playing, you’ll come across many different bitizens with a variety of strengths and weaknesses, It is up to you to assign the right bitizen to the right job. Along the way, you may just give a few people their dream jobs.
When you tap a business floor, a new interface pops up that allows you to hire and fire people as well as to produce items for sale. Different businesses produce different items, and each item is prepared in a different quantity and in a different amount of time. Each business can produce three levels of products. The first level sells the cheapest and is produced in the least amount of quantity, time and money, while the third level sells for the highest price and is produced in a higher quantity but is more expensive and takes the maximum amount of time to produce. To produce a level 1 item, you need to have one employee, two employees for level 2 and three employees for level 3. Once items are ready, the business has to be “stocked” by tapping the business again. Once a business is stocked, it will continue to sell products even if you aren’t playing the game while it still has stock remaining. Once it is sold out, the business will close down and you start the whole process again.
A really easy, though low paying, way to make money is to do the job of the elevator attendant. From time to time, different people will walk into the lobby and request to be dropped to a specific floor. While this sounds easy, when your tower reaches 20+ floors, you’ll realize that it starts to take a while for you to get from the lobby to the floor and back.
Sometimes special bitizens with a large VIP label show up. VIPs provide various advantages to your tower. They range from a real estate agent who can instantly fill up a residential floor to a rich tycoon who buys out all of one item from the business that you take him to. When a VIP appears, you can drop them to the floor that you feel will provide you the most advantage. Choose carefully though.
As your tower starts to grow, you can reorganize floors by moving them and you can also customize the look and feel of each floor by repainting it. Has your tower grown too tall? Relax. You can upgrade your elevator too.
As with most free to play games, there are various in-app purchases that allow you to buy various “TowerBux” packages. TowerBux can be spent on speeding everything up in your tower, from construction to item production.
All in all this game isn’t one that you’ll be playing for hours at a stretch, but it is the game that you’re gonna come back to for five minutes every hour.
