CrowdStar launches Tower Town on iOS: Why build just one Tiny Tower when you can build more?

Presumably after seeing the success achieved by Tiny Tower earlier this year, CrowdStar has decided to launch its own "tiny tower" game on both iPhone and iPad, that combines both Playfish's former Facebook game Hotel City and high-rise living (plus some very minor social features). The goal in Tower Town is to build as many towers as you can to house different kinds of residences and businesses. You'll build towers of increasingly tall heights, with all towers given a Lobby that takes up the first floor.

In your very first tower, you'll have a 2x2 square area to work with, which is enough room for a Coffee Shop, Flower Shop and two single-square Studio Apartments. The next tower is 3x3, giving you another two squares to work with, and so on. Eventually, towers themselves become wider, as well as taller, so that you'll be able to place larger types of homes and businesses in each tower. For instance, a Basic Apartment may be two squares wide, or a Basic Penthouse could take up six full squares (talk about luxury).

Your progress works in a fairly simple circle. You'll be given a new citizen that wishes to live in one of your towers. They only want to live in a particular kind of home, so you'll need to determine which home that will fit into, and whether or not you have the resources necessary to built it. As you expand your towers to the right of the screen, you'll run into mountains and trees. Chopping down the trees or mining the mountains gives you resources like wood planks, cement bricks or glass panels, with different buildings requiring different amount of both these materials and coins to construct. You'll earn coins from the various businesses you place in your towers, which continually turn a profit so long as you continue to collect those profits from them manually.

Once you place a citizen into the home of their dreams, they'll have a secondary requirement that will make them "happy." If you can make every citizen living in a single tower happy, it will increase in start ranking and will therefore give you better payouts when you collect from it. These secondary wishes usually deal with specific decorations that you can purchase from the store. One guest might want a mailbox placed near the tower, while another wants to see flowers growing on the sidewalk. So long as you ensure that these items are close enough to the tower in question, you'll finish with that particular citizen and can move onto the next.

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And so it goes, as you'll mine more mountains and chop more trees only to build more towers in which your virtual citizens can live. The game seems to have a reliance on too many unnecessary taps, as you'll need to tap on rooms more than once to actually build them, or tap on a ready business twice just to collect. If I tapped on the business once, and it has profits waiting for me, why would that be a mistake, requiring a confirmation first?

In terms of social features, the game (as of this writing) only seems to allow you to send gifts to your friends. These won't cost you anything, but you will have to be nearby the friend that you wish to send a present. This is handled via a "Bump" mechanic that seems to serve as a digital form of a handshake.

As it stands, Tower Town is a cute little freemium game, but doesn't offer the kinds of social features you might expect from such a game. It would be great if we could visit our friends' towers, and we'll make sure to let you know if a feature like that launches sometime in the future. For now, Tower Town is available for free on iTunes, so why not give it a go?

Have you tried Tower Town? What do you think of CrowdStar Network's newest mobile game? Sound off in the comments.