Hotel Giant is the latest in a long line of "fly on the wall" sims. This time you have to create the perfect hotel within your budget, monitor your customers' wishes and complaints, make sure that your staff provide maximum service and rake in enough profit to expand your empire. You can do this through any of the three campaigns provided: the tutorial, which takes you through the basics of hotel management; the Hotel Giant campaign, which takes you from buffoon to tycoon in 18 stages; or the random campaign, which is a series of stand-alone challenges to test your mettle. There is also a kind of sandbox mode that lets you set your own goals and objectives. First, choose where to build your five-star establishment, urban, suburban or resort locales. This choice will govern the kind of facilities that you offer in your hotel. Urban areas will need better business facilities, whereas resort locations will need more fun in the sun. Each hotel has a specific number of floors and it's up to you to decide how to kit them out; options include the necessary, such as guest rooms and a lobby area, to the optional, such as games rooms and a library.
Design aspects aside, the most important part of Hotel Giant is the customer service. Once you have opened your doors to Joe public, you can "spy" on your residents to see what the like and dislike about your hotel in an effort to improve their experience. The way you do this is via a follow-cam, which allows you to stalk your customers to see which areas of the hotel, they most like frequenting. In practice, though your sims tend to behave in rather eccentric ways and you can find yourself following an obsessive compulsive who spends their entire stay at the hotel repeatedly taking showers.
Moreover, the goals are a tad on the uninspiring side; unlike other sims such as Theme Hospital, where the missions are quirky and engaging, Hotel Giant errs on the side of the business sim. This is still an entertaining and engaging sim, however, and might tempt people away from Maxis' Sims franchise--even if it is just until the next add-on pack is released. --Emma Turner
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