A couple months ago, NimbleBit (creators of Pocket Frogs [Free]) revealed their upcoming Universal freemium title, Tiny Tower. Since then, I’ve had a chance to get hands on with the game, and so far I really like what I’ve seen.
Your role in Tiny Tower is part building developer, part elevator operator. You’re responsible for the lives of the Bitizens that live and work in your tower, and you’re also responsible for building a tower that brings in the big bucks. Tiny Tower is still in beta, so just about anything could change before release, but let me run down how things work currently.
The tutorial walks you through the basics of building. For each floor you add on to your tower, you can choose from hundreds of different production and residential designs. Residential floors hold your Bitizens, production floors employ them. Whether a production floor is a coffee shop or a hair salon, it needs Bitizens to stock its goods or services.
You have two currencies to work with: coins, and Tower Bux. You build your tower with coins. If you want to speed things up, Bux can be used to instantly finish construction, stock an item or move a new Bitizen into the tower. They can also be converted to coins. As you can probably guess, Bux are the premium consumable in Tiny Tower. No word on what the cost will be yet, but much like Pocket Frogs, you can get by just fine without if you’d rather not pay. Bux can be earned a few ways through normal gameplay, so paying will just speed things up.
Early on, most of the interaction is limited to the elevator. You can ferry people up your tower for tips, and special visitors with unique abilities show up occasionally to mix things up. There’s also an element of time management as you try to get all your production floors fully stocked. As the game progresses, you’ll start to get very busy keeping on top of your tower. This isn’t one of those freemium games that’s best played by setting things up and walking away, that’s for sure.
NimbleBit hasn’t set a release date for Tiny Tower, but they hope to release some time next month. After what I’ve played so far, I can’t wait to get my hands on it when it arrives.
