App Assessment: Tiny Tower Vegas (iOS/Android)

You have your 124-storey tower after months of scrounging for coins and building floor after floor. You feel the game has lost its meaning. Or maybe all it needed was casino gambling.

Some of you might go, “UGH AGAIN?! I just got my Tiny Death Star the way I like it!”, repressing the memories of your 150-storey Tiny Tower of the original game. Well, don’t you fret. Tiny Tower Vegas comes with a new set of distractions and objectives, along with the usual floor types, restocking and general management you have to face when scaling heights on your tower.

Like the previous Tower games from NimbleBit, your objective is to pierce the sky with your ever prosperous tower, building floor after floor of randomised shops and facilities. You hire bitizens to come work in these shops, restocking wares in them. Other bitizens then come by and pay you coins for these wares, and you turn a profit. Bitizens also splash you with coins as you work the tower’s elevator to their desired floors. Easy.

Unlike Tiny Tower or Tiny Death Star, 5-person residential units are now 3-person hotel suites, so your staff members are no longer part of your tower’s residential population. Instead, you ferry guests up to these suites via elevator and they stay in there for a period of time, cashing out when they’re ready to leave.

New staff members come in the form of applicants who approach you in the lobby, and you hire them or toss them aside if you have no use for them. The usual VIP types also await your use for them in the lobby, so the five slots can get packed really fast staring at the game for a while.

Special bitizens are also unlocked as you progress through building floors in the game. These guys provide you with optional side missions that promise you a reward in the form of casino chips when the task is complete.

Yes, casino chips. Because what Vegas-themed game would be complete without compulsive gambling!? A new designated Casino floor type sets up slot machines, blackjack tables and pokes tables for you to waste away your hard-earned casino chips in an effort to win big bucks in the form of… bux. Tower Bux. Bux is the third other in-game currency that you can use to speed up construction of floors and restocking purposes. Bux is also used to spiff up your hotel with upgrades and lobby, elevator and rooftop decorations.

If you want to see if your friends can build a better tower than you, you can share your friend codes around and add their friend codes into your game. Or compete with players around the world by forming or joining a group in the Player’s Club challenges, earning as much moolah as possible from a specific casino floor. Of course, if you want to push for quicker tower everything, casino chips and bus can be purchased via in-app purchases for real cash.

Tiny Tower Vegas, like most of NimbleBit’s newer games, also offers cross-platform cloud syncing, so you will never lose your tower should you decide to delete the game like I had before (RIP Original Tiny Tower).

This game isn’t too hard to recommend to anyone who has a compatible smartphone. Fans of this incessantly addictive building management game should have no problem getting back into the groove of this new iteration. Just don’t spend all your chips on one table.

Assessed on an iPhone 4S and an Android tablet running OS 4.2.2. App originally released in August 2014. App pricing accurate at time of print.