Impressions

[Puman]

Disclaimer: I know the game is in early access and I know the developer probably has further plans that make some of my thoughts invalid. My hope is to raise some points that could improve the game to a higher standard. In it's current state I would recommend Sim Tower above Mad Tower, my hope is it will not stay that way.

Overall
A well made remake of Sim Tower (and the lesser known Yoot's Tower also known as "Sim Tower 2"). I say remake rather than clone, because essentially it is a graphics update, there is so far literally nothing new brought to the table. Thus it has the same goods and bads as Sim Tower. Actually a few more bads but no additional goods as far as I've found.

Graphics
The motion blur effect of people is a neat idea but does not work well in reality. Why? Because the primary game machanic in this game is transportation, the primary feedback on that mechanic are seeing movement and queues, hiding that feedback in a blur takes away the your primary feedback loop (In Sim Tower this was easily distinguished by very ugly but clear and colored person markers standing in long lines, not something I'd like to see reintroduced, but still).
To my surprise I found this game looking better when I turned off all the graphics options. And gosh did that make it more responsive, but thats probably because I played it on a laptop with no dedicated graphics card.

Service boundaries
The 'range' of service rooms is one of the few differences from Sim Tower and is in my opinion primarily annoying as its limits your building and transportation choices severely. The boundaries create an artificial boundary on what is an efficient way to build a tower, thus limiting the oh so important player choice. In Sim Tower items were only limited by transportation distance and capacity, maximizing player choice. I'm guessing these ranges were influenced by Project Highrise, but that is more of a puzzle game than a simulation, so there the boundaries made sense as being part of the puzzle.

Sky lobbies
These are a direct inheritance from Sim Tower, and in this game they make even less sense than they did there. In Sim Tower express elevators could only stop on sky lobbies, so their requirement made some sense. Sky lobbies create something of an opposite to the player interests however: some businesses want high traffic - the most traffic is available in transportation exchange areas - and in those areas (lobbies) you are forbidden to place any businesses, WHAT?! Now in Mad Tower express elevators can stop at any floor, so the most effective way of exchanging them is probably where you can build businesses, making the sky lobbies completely pointless.
Bug? Also bridges cannot be built on sky lobby floors, only all other floors...

Skill tree
The whole idea of exp and skills feels very out of place and with few exceptions the upgrades in it are rather pointless.
Would benefit more from a system of cost/benefit, like hiring a Business Relations Expert for a monthly fee to increase office income or a Marketing Director to increase number of visitors, and perhaps they can gain experience or even get positive/negative perks as time passes, this would make the game more dynamic and give it meaningful choices: "Wow, I found a really good 5-year contract on a hotel-mogul, lets expand the hotel section of my tower...gah, he got the Sloth-perk! Better counter that by hiring him a secretary".

User interface
No major problems but has room for improvement:

• Unresposive, generally need to double/triple-click to place rooms
  
• Clicking on an already open menu should close it
  
• Opening a menu should possibly select what was last selected in that menu
  
• Inconsistent escape key: closes some menues and goes to game menu in other places, making it hard to cancel building
  
• Sim Tower allowed dragging to expand elevator shafts, triple-clicking (see above) for expanding every level gets old fast

Transportation
The core game mechanic of Sim Tower. For some reason it feels like it is more in the background in this game, not being nearly as pivotal. Quite possibly its caused by service boundaries, everyone is happy as long as you solved the boundary puzzle once, you then don't have a transportation puzzle to solve. Problem is, there is not really another mechanic there to replace it, leaving the game kind of empty.
I think one reason was that Sim Tower had predictability, it had clear RULES. Office workers would ALL arrive exactly at 7-8 AM, they would ALL go to lunch at 12 AM and they would ALL go home around 5 PM and get out of the building at 2 AM never to come back if you buggered something. They would change transportation type exactly TWO times and they would walk a maximum of THREE stairs or FOUR escalators getting to their destination, or it would be UNREACHABLE. This game, the rules are a mess, I have no idea what the rules are, where people want to go or when, or how they can enter elevators that should not stop on their floor. Unknown rules also means as a player I can't really design to meet the rules, when everyone's getting mad around an elevator that should not stop on their floor, I have no clue what is going on or what I buggered or even where they want to go. I'm not saying the rules of Sim Tower were perfect, but the predictability of the rules meant I had something I could reason about. The fact that everything happened at the same times gave rise to bottle-necks you had to outsmart. In this game I am yet to see even one bottleneck.
The wide instead of Sim Tower deep elevators, meh, I can live with it, requires a bit more pre-planning is all. Should probably have their size upgradable at a cost instead of by exp-points, that way you get to make choices (remember choices are good!). It does get problematic with things like maid/constructions elevators. Perhaps all elevators of the same type should be buildable right next to eachother, that way you also don't have to tear down old ones when upgrading.

Economy
Basically as uninteresting as in most tycoon games, slow start with lots of waiting for income and then suddenly more money than you can possibly use.

Summary
One thumb up! Lovely for being an early access but I hope more energy can go into refining the gameplay further, it feels a bit bland right now. Choices, choices, choices! And by that I don't mean more office types, I could even do with less (remember Sim Tower only had one type). I mean meaningful choices where what I do create differences and where there are multiple ways of solving the problems efficiently. Scenarios will likely be one important part of this.

Hope this helps somehow! :)

[josephmiller943]

Express Elevators is a misnomer. It should be called Hi-Speed Elevator. The Express Elevators just simply don't exist in Madtower, and it needs to be addressed immediately. Escalators have lower priority than elevators, when it comes to shops and restaurants near lobbies. (This causes major unnecessary elevator traffic delays.) Also, in real life, only a small percentage use the elevator vs the escalators, due to the higher passenger capacity and lack of waiting time. And you have not experienced the horrors of attempting to create a hotel tower. Cleaning Ladies are incredibly inefficient at this time.

[bbalthaser23]

Yes, yes, yes. More eloquently put than I could have done.

Elevators should also have the option to add more cars per shaft (as Simtower did)

The thing with Simtower as with Mad Tower Tycoon it doesn't need a lot of bells and whistles to be a stand out game. I loved loved loved Simtower and was sad when there was never a update for future makes like with Sim City. For me its a time passer and a bit of lets say creating to really get the most out of my tower. I enjoyed Sim towers ability to do different things depending on how you decided to build it whether was mostly hotel, or mostly entertainment.

This being in the new early release stages needs work. Especially when it comes to the initial levels and how they are equated. I feel security isn't offered quickly enough to meet the demand of shops and offices. Why is the level so far unobtainable that your tenants are very unhappy?
I also think you need more than just 1 restaurant/food choices. You should mimic Sim Tower in that they had restaurants and fast food if I recall correctly.

I also agree with the skill tree being out of place for a game of this latitude. Although I think they could do something similar to Sim City or City Skylines in that they have advisors that could be paid for a price to do specific tasks whether good or bad results from them.

It is also a game of pure luck sometimes bad things happen, and sometimes great things happen. I haven't spent enough time yet to see if there are any special events aka dignitaries or visitors that have direct effect on happiness or earnings.


I am also still a bit confused on how to ward off the traffic issue with offices as there isn't a clear option as to how to fix it.

But thank you Puman for being so eloquent with what I cannot spend time describing lol.

And thank you Mad Tower Tycoon I love this game!