Tiny Station – addictive & fun Time Management game to flourish an auto repair shop
by Toni McQuilken
Sep 25, 2012 10:01 AM –
Install
Tiny Station is a fun and addictive little time management game to service and flourish your very own automobile repair shop.
Price: Free
Tested on: Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
Content Rating: Everyone
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- A clever time management game!
- Gameplay is smooth and easy to learn!
- You earn coins for upgrades and repairs at a decent pace!
Cons
- As with most time management games this will eat your personal life due to addiction.
Features:
Tiny Station is a time management game that adds a few tweaks that I really liked. First of all, rather than a beauty shop, you’re a mechanic, and you have to repair the cars coming in. Unlike with games where the customers come sit, and you have to figure out which ones have been there the longest, the cars are driving – you have until the car drives around the road and off the screen to get it into the service station. You start out with one each of an oil change station, a repair station and a tire station, and you move cars between them. As you progress in the game, you earn coins, getting bonus coins at the end for things like getting to every car (to complete a level, you have to service a set number of cars, but there are always a few more cars coming than strictly required.)
At the end of each level, before you start the next, you can use those coins to repair stations so they’ll continue to run at optimum levels, add new stations, or upgrade the ones you have so they can process faster and earn more coins. The upgrades cost 500 to start, and the new stations cost 4,000 coins. But you can earn as many as 800-900 coins in even the early rounds, so you accumulate them quickly enough to never feel like it’s a hassle. You have to strategize what to buy, but you can usually buy something at the end of the level.
I thought the flow was very good, and it was challenging without feeling like there was no way you could meet the goals. I found myself going back to play “just one more round” more than once, which is always a good sign.
-
-
Tiny Station Gameplay
-
-
Tiny Station Goal
-
-
Tiny Station Round Over
-
-
Tiny Station Pause
-
-
Tiny Station Tips
-
-
Tiny Station Items
-
-
Tiny Station Unlock
-
-
Tiny Station Upgrade
Fun Factor:
If you like time management games, then you’ll really enjoy this one. It works the same as most of them out there, but the little tweaks to it were all welcome changes that made the game seem fresh.
Addictive:
As I mentioned above, I kept going back for just one more round, so I’d says it’s pretty addictive. Rounds are short enough that you can play them when you’re out and about and want to kill a few minutes, or you can sit and play for a longer stretch of time. Because the rounds get increasingly difficult, you have to rethink your strategy and really plan ahead to progress.
Graphics:
The graphics are good, but simple enough that when you’re very quickly shuffling things between stations, you can easily tell what needs to go where.
Accelerometer, Vibration & Sound:
The sound effects were cute and non-intrusive, and to be honest, after I started playing I didn’t even pay attention to the background music since I was so focused on the game itself.