Hotel Architect: 3 Flaws that Hinder the Fun

If you enjoy business sims like Roller Coaster Tycoon and Two-Point Hospital, you’ll probably be drawn to Hotel Architect. With its colorful graphics, fun item selections, and relaxed vibes, to say nothing of the sheer appeal of building and running your own hotel, this should be a game that attracts a lot of people. However, that doesn’t mean it’s without flaws.

Hotel Architect is Appealing but Flawed

Developed by Pathos Interactive, Hotel Architect drops you into different scenarios where you must develop the hotels into thriving businesses where people love to stay. There are plenty of things to love in the game. For example, there is a character creator where you can create your own guests and staff. There are also several goals in each scenario, and completing them will unlock fun items for your hotels. However, there are quite a few glaring flaws. Since the game is still in early access, perhaps the developers can iron out some of the flaws before the game is officially released.

1. Those Construction Workers Take Forever!

Every time you want to build a room, add furniture and items, or change wallpaper and flooring, you have to call in construction workers. Even if you just want to delete a picture on the wall, you have to call in construction workers. Moreover, when you want to do a large project like building and furnishing a new room, the workers can take forever to install it. You can call in a larger crew of workers to finish things up faster, but that costs more money to add to an already-expensive project. 

In most other business sims like Roller Coaster Tycoon, you can buy an item, and you have it immediately. If you want to delete an item, you can delete it instantly. While bringing in construction workers might be more realistic, it makes for a whole lot of time waiting. Even when you quicken the game speed, installing a new room might still take a while if it has a lot of furniture, and you need well-furnished rooms in order to raise your hotel’s star rating. You also have to manually send the construction workers home after they finish, which gets annoying.

2. The Staff are Hard to Please

I got notification after notification telling me that I had unhappy staff members. I tried raising their salary and telling them to take breaks, but then I’d get notifications that the same staff members were still unhappy, and I had many staff members resign despite my best efforts. There seems to be little you can do to help unhappy staff members. 

Perhaps the developers could add some more actions that the player can use to help unhappy staff members. I tried improving the staff break room, but that seemed to have no impact on the staff’s happiness level. Maybe we could get options like sending employees on vacation, giving them bonuses, or other perks that could raise their moods. 

3. I Want Easier Rotation

This is a little thing, but it’s an issue I ran into more than once. There is no way to manually rotate items when placing them. Instead, items rotate automatically depending on their proximity with the walls. This can be convenient when you’re placing things that lean against walls. However, when you want to place something like a pool table in the center off the room, good luck rotating it into the position you want.

An option to manually rotate objects would solve this problem. Many business sims will include a rotate button or let you rotate objects with the right mouse button, so that shouldn’t be too hard to implement in this game. 

Hotel Architect is Still Fun

Despite its flaws, Hotel Architect is still an enjoyable experience. There are so many unlockables that make you want to keep playing, and the sheer delight of designing your own hotel draws the player in. If the flaws are fixed, Hotel Architect could be an amazing game when it fully releases. You can play the early access version of Hotel Architect on Steam for $19.99.