Hotel Giant 2

Hotel Dwarf 2

This sense of shallowness is the real flaw with Hotel Giant 2 in our eyes, as the one thing that permeates the entire game is its distinct lack of personality. There’s no hook to really engage players with and the whole experience is as vacuous as a supermodel launched into space without a suit – though that actually has the merit of being a pretty good idea, at least.

Looking back on all the really good business-building games of the past, we’ve noticed a bit of a theme, which is that those games which don’t offer a really hardcore, addictive and well-structured gameplay will often be built around a great sense of humour, or at least an intriguing idea.

Games like Transport Tycoon can fit into the first category, along with Rollercoaster Tycoon (or any Chris Sawyer game, for that matter). The more humour-centric games however are things like Theme Hospital or Sim Ant. Hotel Giant 2’s main failing is that it doesn’t sit in either category very well. It isn't funny and it isn't very hard, or even rewarding.


Hotel Giant 2 has a fair bit of micromanagement in some areas, such as with customer satisfaction where you’re encouraged to follow literally every guest and cater to their every whim in order to claim a bonus for getting them 100 percent satisfied. Yet, in other areas this is all undermined by automatic hirings and cheat codes that are a critical part of playing the game normally.

As for any sense of personality or humour contained in the game, it looks like it must have been stolen by the last guests, who took the free towels and probably urinated in the kettle too. It doesn’t matter if you’re laying out a new library for your hotel or re-cloning another master bedroom, the hotel is always filled with identical staff and customers, none of whom ever do anything interesting. Again, a comment about Paris Hilton would be apt.

The reality is quite simply that nobody has ever been sat at home on a Tuesday night and thought to themselves that a hotel management simulation would be a good way to spend the evening. There used to be people like that in ancient times admittedly, but the Spartans took to killing them at birth by casting them into a bit filled with stolen towels and suspiciously yellowed kettles.


It’s not that Hotel Giant 2 is a particularly bad game though. If you do happen to have a burgeoning adoration with the idea of running your own hotel, then Hotel Giant 2 does offer you a chance to do that. Is that honestly the case though? Videogames are largely a matter of wish fulfilment, but we doubt this wish has been wanted.

You can build pretty much whatever hotel you want to, with the option to even choose the size and type of TVs on offer in your guest rooms, though the interface for doing all this is cumbersome and awkward thanks to its reliance on tiny-little pictures rather than nice big text.

Do your customers pay enough to deserve big LCD televisions, or will you leave them with outdated rear-projection TVs instead? These are the type of thrilling questions you can think about thanks to Hotel Giant 2.

Not faulty in any specific regard, Hotel Giant 2 is just massively bland and uninteresting. You’d better like hotel management to an unhealthy degree if you’re thinking of buying Hotel Giant 2, because otherwise it’ll knock all the fun out of you, steal all your kettles and wee on your towels. Yeah, you heard us.

Score Guide