Pocket PC Thoughts: Build Straight Up: Tower Mogul 1.0 Reviewed

Virt(ual) Feedback
To move ahead in the game, you’ll want to keep an eye on what your Virts think of your tower. To do this, you can click on the "magnifying glass" tool and get a better look at the mood of your Virts. In the info view, the rooms change color from green to red to show their occupants' happiness. You can view the info on a particular unit to see what those occupants think. You can also change the rent on people to try to make them happier (or to make more money). As with all games of this type, these are the real challenges. Making a pretty tower is fun; keeping that tower happy is the challenge.


Figure 4: In this view, you can see at a glance what the mood of your tower is. Looks like some of my Virts aren’t happy.

At the end of each month, you’re given a summary of what has gone on in your tower over the past month. You’ll be able to get suggestions from your advisers, review money charts, and inspect population graphs. These are nice but I didn’t find to be all that useful. As long as I kept building units, I made money.


Figure 5a: Your trusted advisers.

Figure 5b: Monthly Income report. Not one of my best months

Figure 5c: Population/Money chart.

Game Options
The game offers two difficult modes: Beginner and Hardcore. Beginner is very simple. As long as you don’t spend your money in the first few days of the month, you’ll do fine. For the experienced gamer, Hardcore should offer more of a challenge. It starts you with less money and gives you more disasters. You can also choose the music, game control, and some other options once the game has started. Personally, I play all Pocket PC games with the sound off. The sound in Tower Mogul is good but sparse. The music though, is not that great.


Figure 6: The in-game options you can set. The “Keep device turned on” is a nice feature.

To keep things interesting, the game will present you with disasters. So far, I’ve seen bomb threats and fires. You use your security and maintenance forces to handle these. For some strange reason, I had a fire that wouldn’t go out. It just kept burning for months. Luckily, my Virts didn’t seem to mind too much.


Figure 7: Disasters are all part of managing a tower. Check out the fire!

Gotchas

• Hard to see what your Virts are doing;
  
• Game moves slow;
  
• Interface is a bit confusing;
  
• Help system is lacking, need to go online to find out how to play;
  
• Gameplay is nothing new.

Where to Buy
Tower Mogul 1.0 by eSoft Interactive can be downloaded as a trial or purchased for $11.95 from Handango. [Affiliate]

Specifications
Tower Mogul 1.0 for Pocket PC is compatible with a variety of Pocket PCs (check Handango for the complete list). It required 2578K of free space and 5MB of program memory.

Conclusions
I’m really torn about how to rate this game. It’s fun, but I’ve played this game before. Also, the interface is somewhat confusing. It’s hard to tell which icon to click to load, save, etc. If the help system were better, this would be easier. But, after playing for a week or so I was able to get around in the game without a problem.

Tower Mogul 1.0 is a good game - not great, just good. I highly recommend that you try out the demo before buying it. The pace is slow but if you can look past that, it's a good deal for $11.95. If you've ever played Sim Tower, you'll find this to be an almost exact clone for the Pocket PC.