I miss Bullfrog. Theme Hospital and Theme Park defined how management games should work, light-heartedly providing entertainment whether you were abstractly managing your empire in healthcare or making small children vomit, respectively. The key to the resounding success of those games was their depth, or to be more specific their lack thereof. The pernickety, unnecessary details are glazed over; you don’t need to pick the trim on the shoes of your maintenance men. You don’t need to worry about whether your ice cream provider uses only non-genetically modified corn starch. You can concentrate on building fun rides, deciding how many slack tongue choppers you need in theatre and blasting rats with a cursor aimed shotgun.
But nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, and here in 2009 I’m presented with Hotel Giant 2, sequel to, well, Hotel Giant 1. It’s not a game about a giant who has made his home in a disused hotel and more’s the pity. It is instead a simulation of hotel management so detailed that when you complete the game you should be looking for capital to buy out that Hilton lot and show them all how it’s supposed to be done. At this point you’ll either be rubbing your hands with glee at the chance to forge a virtual empire in the hospitality sector or you’ll already have yawned and wandered off to kill something (in the virtual inhospitality sector).
The core of the game is this: you are given a half-finished or run-down lodge and told to make it profitable, to do that you are to be the bitch of every tiny person who walks through the doors of your digital hotel. Their every whim must be catered for if you are to succeed. This means that you have to personally deliver a snack basket to the miserable, greedy little gits or put a vending machine within easy reach of their room before they storm out and write you a strongly worded letter. If they want a larger room you’d better get the hammer out and take down that plasterboard wall, pronto, and if the restaurant staff are too slow then you’d better get some quicker ones in there or buy them all roller-skates.
The game presents you with a bewildering array of choices, the sheer number of light fittings available in a given room beggars belief and selecting dishes for the menus could take up a whole afternoon. It suddenly occurred to me at this point that these are details that people who are building REAL hotels would spend time agonising over. It became clear that a great deal of thought had gone into the design of this game, even if the implementation of it hadn’t been completely successful...
The bugs are legion but comical. Admittedly the crash when changing any of the graphics options was not so funny, but the little guy stuck in the elevator in the lobby trying to wear his suitcase like a party-hat (above centre) certainly was. The tutorial also seems to focus rather too heavily on taking photos of your hotel rather than anything important like how you actually redesign the bloomin’ thing. It steepens the learning curve somewhat, but hey, no one said owning and running a hotel was going to be easy, did they...?
If you REALLY like your management, your micro management and your sub micro management then this really is the game for you. If you have a passing interest in the hotel trade as well then replace the number on the bottom of this review with a 10 and rush off to the shops. If you are a more normal individual then you’ll probably find this a challenge to stick with due to its dreary representation of management life. It just isn’t fun. If it was, I guess we’d have a lot more hotels in this country. Bullfrog explained why we have so many hospitals...
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