Having been released to the general public last week, Hotel City appears to be a 2D downhill simulator created by Playfish, the same developers who brought you the famous Restaurant City and Pet Society.

At first glance, Hotel City is a sim similar to the old Sim Tower with a little bit of Restaurant City thrown into the mix. For days I was looking at the ad while playing Restaurant City and wondering what Hotel City really is. What kind of new entertainment can you provide me? So without further thought I decided to give it a try and click on the ad to find out.

how to play

When I first launched the app on my Facebook account, the game loads with no hiccups or much load time (thank goodness Playfish fixed the load time in their games). Once the upload was complete I started naming my Hotel (Mabel High) and right after that the game tutorial started. The game tutorial is very simple and easy to learn for any age group. Instruct new players what to do and how the game interface works.

Hotel City works in a 2D side-scrolling environment that allows you to move freely around the screen to get a better view of your hotel with an interface neatly placed around the screen. Game settings, build menus, and status bars are positioned around the edge of the screen to allow for easy access and without blocking the hotel environment. However, what impressed me the most was that for a beta version, Playfish already added various types of furniture and rooms available to use in the game.

After familiarizing myself with my new surroundings, I took the next step in creating my new hotel. As a newly established hotel, the game placed you with 3 temporary employees, a lobby area, and enough gold to build a cozy hotel with 3 small rooms, a cleaning closet, and some additional decorations. Nothing great when you’re just starting a new establishment really, but good enough to attract a small crowd anyway.

Of course, a good hotel would not be complete without workers to entertain and serve guests. The new staff during the start of the game is an unnamed avatar with red tags calling themselves “Temp Staff”. Unlike Playfish’s previous sim, you can’t just hire any of your friends on your roster to replace them, disappointing. One must send out an ad to recruit his friends as permanent staff for the new hotel. This can be quite troublesome at first, as not many people are playing yet and most will ignore your call for help. However, if you manage to get your friends to work at your new hotel, the rewards will be well worth it as the cost per shift will be greatly reduced.

Some elements of the game don’t seem to change much as my staff still need to ‘rest’ after a long day at work. Although you don’t have to constantly monitor your workers’ progress, you still need to log in a day or two to start the next shift. The work shift comes in 4 different configurations for now. The shortest shift will be 2 hours and the longest one provided is now around 48 hours based on your budget.

A certain improvement over Playfish’s previous game is the friends list. In the bottom panel, you’ll see that your friends’ list will now have a gold indicator, indicating that there’s a reward to claim if you visit them. Gone are the days of wondering who you haven’t visited during the day and what loot you’ve missed.

Finally, the only thing I can’t really do in-game right now is sell all my old furniture or send it to my friends in need, as the feature is not yet available at this stage of development. So, there’s nothing I can do right now but throw all that junk back in my garage while I wait for Playfish to enable that feature.

graphics

Actually, there is little to say about the game’s graphic, as it looks quite simple and leaves a lot of room for improvement. There’s a little 3D element to the game, but it’s very hard to notice unless you look very, very carefully at the little avatar’s head. Yes, that hard-working little avatar head is actually 3D, but nothing to really wow me from my seat. Seriously, they actually expected more than just a 3D bobblehead.

Sound

Music and sound can do a bit of work. Although it started out fine, the music can get quite annoying after listening to it for 10 minutes. The same goes for sound, as people will make various sleepy and yawning noises, which is quite irritating. As usual, it is recommended to turn the sound off unless you enjoy listening to the same thing over and over again.

Conclusion

For now, the game looks quite promising for a BETA version. However, there are many areas for improvement. Although it is nothing that other developers have never done over the years, but to kill time at office or school, this game can keep you busy for a few minutes of your time. As for me, I’ll keep an eye on this game from time to time, just hopefully more content will be added by the time the game goes gold.