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Oh fuck, Tiny Tower.

Tiny Tower came out, and I have been playing this bullshit NONSTOP. It’s so fantastic, and free, and you should get it.

Basically, Tiny Tower is Sim Tower meets Farmville. That makes it sound not great, but it’s better than that.

I’ve never played Farmville, but here’s what I know as the bad parts of Farmville: it constantly hassles your Facebook friends, and if you don’t constantly check in, you not only don’t gain benefits, but lose the work you’ve done. To be efficient, you have to pay money, as well. Lots of money.

Tiny Tower doesn’t do that.

The only real interaction with your friends is that you can look at their towers and compare them. That’s cool, and no hassle involved. While you do gain benefits by constantly checking in and restocking your businesses, if you let it set for an hour, a day, a week, you don’t lose the progress you’ve made. What you’ve stocked doesn’t go “bad.” You just aren’t slowly accumulating wealth. When you come back and play again, nothing will be fucked up. Also, there are plenty of ways in-game to earn “Tower Bux,” which is the for-pay currency. It makes it so you can’t do every single thing without paying, but if you prioritize, you can do some of the stuff you’d like. It makes it so the game is fun without paying money, which is really a flaw of a lot of these sorts of social games that I’ve seen.

Really, though, the game has a lot of style. It has a pixel aesthetic that works, and isn’t just used for nostalgia’s sake. It’s exciting to see what crazy new businesses you’re going to open, as you don’t get to choose. You just pick between 5 areas: Food, Retail, Service, Creative, and Recreation, and the game builds you one at random. You may get a bar, if you build a Food place, or you may get a Frozen Yogurt shop.
You can earn extra Tower Bux and get bonuses if you put the various “Bitzens” into their dream jobs, as well, though you have to build apartment floors for them to stay in so they can work in your building too. They all have stats relating to the five different types of businesses: put more skilled people into jobs they like, and they restock and sell product faster, so you can build more floors, so you can build more businesses, so you can make more money to build more floors, and so on.

It’s addicting seeing your little empire build up, and after you get going, there’s very little maintenance, just a few button presses here and there, with sporadic decision-making moments of who to employ where and what to build next. You are constantly checking in, if you want things to build quickly, but you don’t have to.

I love it. It crashes whenever I open the game outside of wifi, because it can’t connect to Game Center, but other than that? Awesome. Way better than their previous game, Pocket Frogs, and Pocket Frogs is pretty sweet. If you don’t hate this sort of game in general, at least give this one a try. It’s a fun time. Also, add me and let me see your tower. I’m poetfox. I have a paintball course on like floor 16.