Maximum Capacity: Hotel Giant

HOTEL GIANT PC

Hotel Giant is one of JoWooD’s newest and most impressive offerings that allow you to build your very own hotel and design the complex to your unique specifications.  Following in the footsteps of the still-wildly-popular simulation game The Sims you will be able to observe your guests behavior and assess their happiness.  Visually this game looks quite similar to The Sims but allows for far more detailed observation of your guests giving you the ability to view the atmosphere literally from your customer’s perspective.  Hotel Giant includes over 20 super-detailed complexes in more then 20 different cities.  You’ll be able to customize everything from the hotel’s foyer to the game rooms and exercise facilities.  Starting with a quaint little bed and breakfast and eventually working your way up to an enormous mega-hotel that will only offer its elite services to celebrities and people of power is what Hotel Giant is all about.  Hundreds of different objects can be purchased and used in your hotel, each with their own specific set of attributes that can add or detract from the overall hotel experience. 

Graphics are decidedly a step up from The Sims with cleaner textures and more fluid character animations.  There are many different visual nuances in the game, from expensive vases with detailed designs on them to telephones that actually look realistic when viewed up close.  The model renderings in the game could have benefited quite a bit if the developers added more unique animations of customer interaction and emotional responses, as it stands however, they rarely do anything out of the norm and watching the customers becomes boring after only a few minutes of observation.

Hotel Giant’s musical tracks are very reminiscent of The Sims as well with light-hearted happy-happy tunes but each track is only around 3 minutes and the transition between melodies is unpolished at best.  Every time a new musical track starts up the on-screen action comes to a grinding halt for approximately 5-10 seconds, or however long it takes your cd-rom to load the next musical track off the CD.  This problem may have been specific to my system but I’ve never seen anything like this occur in other games.  Sound effects in the game leave a lot to be desired; only the bare minimums of aural enhancements were included.

Trying to take into consideration the numerous facets of successfully running a hotel is at first overwhelming, and remains unnecessarily complicated well into the game.  Coming to grips with the unique dynamics and objectives of the game takes some getting use to – expect a learning curve around 2-3 hours.  The interface layout seems simple and pretty similar to other personal-simulation games but its not nearly as intuitive, if you have on-screen menus open you must first take the time to close the open menu before you are allowed to access other functions in the interface.  Becoming more efficient at running the hotel usually consists of nothing more then memorizing where to click and what variables to adjust, relegating the experience to more of a chore then a legitimate form of entertainment.  On paper this seems like a good game – being able to manage and customize such a wide amount of variables, but you soon find that you rarely know what it is your supposed to change or modify in order to show a respectable profit margin.

By far the best quality of the game is the ability to customize your hotel and all the rooms in it with hundreds of different objects, the intricacies of designing rooms in your hotel should satisfy all but the most die-hard closet-interior-decorators.  When designing and interacting with your hotel your range of motion and perspective is greatly varied and you have many options at your disposal.  Rotating different floors of the hotel or zooming in is achieved simply by holding the right-mouse-button and moving the mouse left or right to rotate or forward and back to zoom in and out.  But there are some downfalls to the design engine, when building specific rooms the walls get in the way a lot, there is no way I could find short of zooming in so close that your perspective is hindered to get rid of an individual room’s walls.  In addition, if you design a room and then later find out that the room is not big enough to hold all the required items you are unable to easily resize the room to meet the required specifications.  In one instance when I was adding a woman’s bathroom to the hotel restaurant, I found that after placing the required toilet-stall and sink there was no room left to add a door.  A door!  The only option I had at this point was to delete the room altogether or get rid of the stall or sink to make room for the door, this is bad.

The dynamics for combining different objects in a room need a good amount of polish and refining before Hotel Giant can be considered a legitimate contender with The Sims.  Sometimes the game won’t allow you to, for instance, place a dartboard on the wall simply because there is a carpet placed on the floor.  Little discrepancies like this hinder what could have been a great game. 

Unfortunately, there is no option to build the exterior structure of the hotel to your specifications; you can only use pre-made designs.  The good news is that there are 20 different variations of hotels available in the game.  Aside from the main hotel mode you can also choose to play a random campaign wherein the game will randomly choose objectives for you to accomplish in a set amount of time.  These objectives are nothing out of the ordinarily and usually consist of making a certain amount of money or keeping a certain amount of people happy. 

In a lot of ways Hotel Giant successfully conveys a lot of the fun aspects of other more popular personal and business simulation games but unlike in these games however you don’t grow any sort of emotional attachment to the characters, they are basically no more then units of measure that dictate your ultimate success or failure.  There are long stretches of time in the game where virtually nothing of interest happens.

It is unknown at this point whether there will be downloadable objects from the internet for this game like new arcade-machine designs or other new additions.  Downloadable extras would certainly enhance the enjoyment of this game and greatly increase the overall lifespan but we can only wait and see what JoWooD plans on doing.  Nevertheless, even without bonus extras this game will still keep a lot of people busy for quite some time.

At worst this game still remains a somewhat enjoyable experience thanks to the deep customizability of creating rooms.  Building and managing an entire hotel from the ground up by designing everything from a game room to the health and fitness centers is simply fun to do thanks to the plethora of options you have available for customizing.

Gameplay: 6.4
Getting used to the complicated control scheme takes longer then ideal but once you get the hang of building rooms and monitoring customer’s happiness the game transforms into an enjoyable exercise in interior-decorating.    

Graphics: 7.9
Visually Hotel Giant looks like a moderately updated The Sims.  Textures are sharp, environments detailed, graphically Hotel Giant looks great.  Some additional character animations would have been nice but as it stands you can’t really fault this game in the least based on its aesthetical value.

Sound: 5.2
Music gets increasingly jarring after around a hour of play due mainly to the fact that there are only a handful of different tunes and they repeat way too often.  I also experienced some issues with the game grinding to a halt every time a new sound track was loaded.

Difficulty: Medium
Like The Sims you are able to play on and on until your hearts content, there are different objectives to complete but there is no way to truly ‘beat’ the game.  The most difficult aspect of the game is learning how to efficiently interact with the interface and start turning a profit but once you become accustomed to the unique dynamics and requirements of the game you’ll find that there is a lot of entertainment to be had with Hotel Giant.

Concept: 7.7 
Creating and managing an entire hotel is a good idea but the developers didn’t quite pull it off with this title.  The goal seems like it was to combine the personal human interaction and design elements of The Sims with the ability to be able to manage a much bigger area but only the design element succeeds in being entertaining.

Overall: 7.2

Hotel Giant is the kind of game that grows on you, if you can sit through the boring tutorials and generic objectives then you are sure to get more than a few enjoyable moments out of this game.