I'm gonna give it a recommend just because I've managed to sink about 40 hours into it already, but tbh there's a lot of problems with this game - both bugs and quality of life issues that really need addressing. Even in sandbox mode, the game stifles creativity with its game play which seems completely counter intuitive to the entire point of the game. Furniture and other placeables are ranked by a star rating, the average of which for any particular room dictates its total rating and therefore its rental price - and we're talking by drastic amounts. The same room type at one star rents at $200 per night, while five star rents at $5500 a night. The net result, then, is that you end up placing basically the exact same high level stuff, because there's not enough variety across the board, and leaving out little details that would make the rooms look better because they'd actually bring down the rating. The other thing that stifles creativity is the room requirements themselves, which are present even in sandbox mode. I get that a room needs a bed and a toilet, but why does every single room require 2 pictures, 2 cabinets and 2 wall lamps, for example? The whole mechanic would be better if the very bare minimum to make the room habitable were requirements to renting a room, and if the overall rating of a room were more based upon how many luxury items and extra mod cons were included over and above the minimum, rather than purely the star rating of the accumulated placed items. I'm rp'ing my hotel needs, creating a selection of rooms at all price and rating points, therefore drastically reducing my potential income - and I still have 4 million more money than I know what to do with - but it's really not necessary and I suspect most people will just go for maxing out each room. There's a lot of bugs. Some relate to the physical models (almost every ceiling in every room is incorrectly place, and apart from looking unsightly, it exposes extra tiles you need to decorate to try and cover up the problem). There's also one way texture issues in many doorways and windows, particularly when you add extra floors. Also, on every reload, a whole bunch of bizarre stuff ends up in the penthouse level roof top pool - columns, statues, random chairs, books. There are also UI issues, such as it being possible to bring up the tablet and then the action wheel, at which point you can never dismiss the tablet and have to quit out of the game to continue. The method of selecting items and patterns really needs some work too. Apart from being incredibly tedious in some categories, the scrolling through textures and colour options is positively vomit inducing - I can genuinely see why someone in the forums said it gave them a seizure! It would be much, much better to just show a gallery of options on the screen and pick from them directly rather than force you to focus on a single square of rapidly changing textures and colours as you endlessly mousewheel through them. I cannot express enough how horrible it actually is in practice. Rarely does any kind of motion in games make me feel sick, but this one does it in spades just because of a poorly thought out UI. It also desperately needs a 'duplicate' or 'dropper' type tool to clone objects, or save them to favourites or something. As well as some sort of snap to grid type system. It's really irritating looking down a corridor and seeing all your wall and ceiling lights are just slightly different heights and placements and knowing it's virtually impossible to fix it. It'd be nice to turn off the cookie cutter npc's and stuff in the lobby. they add nothing, especially when there's 10 of the same model standing around on top of tables and the checkin desks doing nothing but looking dumb. And they don't ever seem to use any of the facilities. Never seen a single person in the restaurant or sauna or pool levels etc. Which is a shame. I hadn't even seen them so much as sit on a chair until I substituted all my lobby chairs from two stars to a particular five star chair. They still won't sit on the sofas though. Apparently standing on coffee tables is preferable. It'd also be nice to have a dedicated photo mode. I know you can hide the UI, but that doesn't really cut it, especially when the devs seem to have gone out of their way to make even taking a regular screenshot so hard! It doesn't work with Steam's screenshot key, or Nvidia Geforce's, and the only 'native' way to screenshot is Windows Game Bar. With these kind of games, you're doing it for the creativity (you're definitely NOT doing it for a hotel based economy and management reasons in this game!), which you want to be able take photos of! Yet this game, despite being the kind that should really scratch that House Flipper type itch, seems to really want to stomp on your creativity at every turn and make so many aspects of the game frustrating. That said, like I said at the start, I've put 40 hours into playing around with it, which is more than I put into most, so it isn't all bad! It could be great - there's the basis of a really satisfying game here. But as it is there's a LOT of issues to overlook to persevere with. It feels more like I've managed to be creative in spite of the limitations the game continually throws at me rather than because the game affords me a good level of creativity. One other point; I dislike how the DLC is presented. I won't be buying any. But it's frustrating that that means I end up with a blank unrated unusable vast room in my hotel because it's earmarked for a gym it'll never have. It would have been trivial to have that on another floor and only if you have the dlc.
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