Tower Time by Caine Rotherham
Overview
This is a neat little Sim game. You are trying to create the Wal*Mart of towers (a little of everything thrown in in no specific order) for little flying blue aliens who are very easily pleased as long as someone they know is getting food and someone they know is being entertained. You start out being able to build only an Office and a Jail Cell. You build these until you have expanded your 1-room building into a 50 room tower. After you have 50 guests, you can build a Double Office and a Hotel Room. All the while you are building you must hire people to come in every now and again to clean and inspect your tower to avoid fires and hygenic problems. After a population of 50, you get a Café with which you must now keep your aliens happy. You have to wait until 300 people are in your tower to expand any further and be faced with much greater challenges.These aliens are very easy to please, as I mentioned before. They will come and wait in your lobby until Hell freezes over. They will take any room, even if they came to rent a Double Office they will be willing to take a Jail Cell. It's suprisingly fun, though, if slowly progressive. I thought it got a little too hard when the cleaning service owner died and your customers wanted entertainment. I had 15 $2000 Wash Houses and the damn thing still kept getting dirty. This was complicated by the fact that since it was dirty, no one wanted to eat, so my Hunger dropped and people started leaving. Most of the Wash Ladies quit and since my population dropped below 300 I could no longer build Wash Houses or hire the cleaning service.
EDIT: I forgot to mention the pop-ups that come when you unlock new rooms. This was a very professional aspect, although the message box was an ugly grey color. Many were comical and really made the game more enjoyable. Sorry about forgetting this earlier.
Graphics
The graphics were a little under par for a Sim game. Most professional Sim/Tycoon games have bad graphics, but your aliens in this game were blue blobs and the rooms had a nice characteristic, simplistic symbol. Still, I wouldn't say I was impressed by the layout and HUD of the screen.5/10
Audio
Pretty good. There was some very awkward background music. I didn't feel that it fit to the theme of the game at all, nor did the multiple tracks blend together very nicely. The fact that there were multiple sound-tracks though was nice. The sound-effects were very well done. They wore short and very descriptive of the action they were representing.7/10
Controls
Rotherham doesn't really explain the controls in this game. You use the mouse to click on buttons is all that is evident. Once I filled up my screen with tower, I was worried I'd be forced to use the minimap to build the rest of my building, but through a little experimentation realized that you could very smoothly move the screen around with the arrow keys.7/10
Replayability
Decent. The game allows you 5 game saves, and perhaps if this game didn't progress so slowly, I would've wanted to play more. Also, the layout of your building held no bearing on the efficiency of your tower, which made the game alot more linear.5/10
Target Appeal
Good. If you like to play Mall Tycoon, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Sim City, etc., check this game out. He did a very good job of making the menus user-friendly, even if they weren't pretty to look at.9/10
Game Flow
Poor. While you were rewarded for your progression with additional rooms being unlocked (each presenting their own new challenge), the game progressed so slowly after getting the Café that I thought maybe the game glitched and wasn't going to unlock any more rooms. Also, by the time you unlocked new areas, you could get enough money to build every room that was unlocked in seconds. That caused alot of monotony.6/10