Tiny Towers Review

Tiny Tower is an game for the iPhone or iPod Touch.

Tiny Tower is an game for the iPhone or iPod Touch. In Tiny Tower, you control the activities of a building and the people that live there. The game starts with two floors, a lobby and an apartment complex. You get a simple tutorial, and then you are left with the tower. The concept of the game is simple. You rent out rooms in apartments to people, those people work the shops in the tower, and the money from the shops let you build more and bring in more people. In practice, it is not simple at all. Every 5-10 minutes, a shop runs out of supplies and needs to be restocked. The elevator is controlled by you, and a lot of people want to go to different floors. People may be in a job they don’t like.

One of the great things (or bad, depending) about Tiny Tower is the ability to see the moods of the tower’s residents. Each resident has a dream job, and by employing them there, they become very happy. If you employ them at a job completely different, they become unhappy. One way to see the residents’ moods is through BitBook. It’s like Facebook, but for the “bitizens” of the tower. Some of the statuses show that they don’t like their job, some are random, and some are amusing.

Another feature of the game is the currency. There are normal coins, which are used to buy supplies for stores and pay for construction. There are also Tower Bux, which can be used to rent out rooms to bitizens, or to speed up construction and restocking. Tower Bux can also be exchanged for coins, but not the other way around. You can buy Tower Bux from the in-app store, but they are not needed for gameplay and can be earned by playing the game.

Reviewed Device: iPad 2

[review pros=”Simple, 8-bit art, easy to play, and cute graphics” cons=”Tower Bux is too expensive and hard to get after a while” score=70]