Dream Hotel Master: Review

This game was reviewed on PC.

Reviewed by:  David Cameron

Dream Hotel Master, played on a PC, is a game that takes the player into the realm of hotel management, where you are tasked with building, managing, and expanding your very own hotel empire. While the game shows potential with its concept and charming visuals, it ultimately falls short in several key areas, resulting in an experience that is more frustrating than fun.

Charming but Shallow Visuals

At first glance, Dream Hotel Master captivates with its bright and cheerful graphics. The art style is colorful and inviting, with a level of detail that brings the hotel environments to life. From the lush gardens to the bustling lobbies, each area is designed to evoke a sense of hospitality and warmth. However, despite the initial visual appeal, the charm quickly wears off as you realize the graphical assets are reused frequently, making the environments feel repetitive and lacking in variety.

Gameplay Mechanics: A Mixed Bag

The core gameplay loop of Dream Hotel Master involves constructing rooms, managing staff, and ensuring guests are satisfied. On paper, this sounds engaging, but in practice, it's a mixed bag. The building mechanics are straightforward, allowing you to place and upgrade rooms with ease. However, the management aspect is where the game starts to falter.

The AI for staff and guests is simplistic, often leading to frustrating scenarios where staff members ignore tasks or guests have unreasonable demands that are impossible to meet. Additionally, the game's difficulty curve is poorly balanced. Early levels are too easy, while later stages ramp up in difficulty abruptly, making it hard to maintain a consistent level of enjoyment.

Sound Design: Forgettable

The sound design in Dream Hotel Master is serviceable but forgettable. Background music is pleasant but lacks variety, becoming repetitive after extended play sessions. Sound effects for actions like building and guest interactions are basic and do not add much to the overall immersion. There is a noticeable lack of voice acting, which could have added more personality to the game's characters and enhanced the player's connection to their hotel staff and guests.

User Interface: Clunky and Unintuitive

Navigating through Dream Hotel Master's menus and interfaces can be a cumbersome experience. The user interface is cluttered, with small icons and poorly organized menus that make managing your hotel more of a chore than it should be. Important information is often buried under multiple layers of menus, making it difficult to find what you need quickly. This lack of intuitiveness can be frustrating, especially during the more hectic moments of gameplay when quick decision-making is crucial.

Replay Value: Limited

While Dream Hotel Master offers various levels and challenges, the replay value is limited due to the repetitive nature of the gameplay. Once you've mastered the basic mechanics, there's little incentive to continue playing, as the game doesn't introduce enough new elements to keep things fresh. The lack of a meaningful progression system also means that each new hotel you manage feels very similar to the last, diminishing the sense of accomplishment and growth.

Conclusion

Dream Hotel Master has the potential to be a captivating hotel management game with its charming visuals and engaging concept. However, it falls short in execution, with clunky interfaces, simplistic AI, and repetitive gameplay. While it might offer some fun for a short while, the frustrations and limitations quickly become apparent, making it hard to recommend wholeheartedly.

For those who love management sims, Dream Hotel Master might be worth a try if you can find it on sale or don't mind the flaws. However, if you're looking for a polished and satisfying hotel management experience, you might want to look elsewhere.

Reviewed by: David Cameron