Nobilis Hotel Giant 2 review

Hotel Giant 2 blends The Sims-style people watching with business strategy.

You are the manager of a hotel, or chain of hotels, and charged with maximising profits. Game variants include a campaign mode with increasingly difficult objectives, such as running a pre-built luxury hotel or building your own hotel from scratch.

Building afresh is actually a good place to start, as it helps you get your head around each element and its impact on your profits. The shape and exterior of your hotel is pre-defined, though you can choose from various sizes, styles and locations. This empty shell can then be filled as you wish. Once you've designed a room, you can copy and paste it, which saves you lots of time choosing and placing objects. The game also includes all the furniture and extras that you might expect, though they look horribly dated, with nothing that will trouble Ikea in the design stakes. This leaves your hotel looking like something that would only please aging mid-west Americans.

Our first efforts failed to make a big mark on the hotel world, and by looking at the pre-built examples we soon realised why - the game sees hotels more as entertainment centres than simply places to sleep. If you want to make any serious money, you'll need bars, saunas, game arcades, shops and posh restaurants. Some of the pre-built hotels have two floors of such activities for every floor of guest rooms. But the game's vision of a successful hotel contradicts any idea that this might be a serious business simulation.

This lack of believability could have been offset by adding a human element. Instead your staff and guests are emotionless automatons. There are no disasters to manage - just your patrons' endless and banal needs to fulfil. The game is technically sound and provides a challenge, but it's about as much fun as running a boarding house for robots.