Hotel Mogul is one of the newest titles brought to retail stores by Focus Multimedia and sees you taking on the role of a property building tycoon.  You play as Lynette, a woman who has been cheated out of her business by her deceitful husband and conniving best friend.  A clause in Lynette’s marriage contract sees her husband take her beloved business from her, leaving Lynette with no alternative but to start a new business and try and earn enough money to buy the business back.

The game features over thirty levels and each level presents you with a new set of goals, ranging from completing a specific number of hotels to earning a certain amount of money.  Each hotel you raise will give you an income, enabling you to buy further materials and thus build more hotels and other structures, such as restaurants, city malls and statues.  Some of these items only become available later on in the game as you unlock enough points to buy them in the shop.  Additionally some scenarios require you to have access to a specific building or structure before you can access it.

Each scenario is timed and completing the level within the set timeframe will give you an expert score.  These timescales are extremely tight and there isn’t exactly room to put a foot wrong!  However, they are by no means impossible and a little careful planning could see you achieving the expert scores, even if it’s only with a couple of seconds to spare!

In and amongst the levels are other small hidden object puzzles, which are quite well placed to break up the levels and ensure it doesn’t become too repetitive if you’re playing for long stretches.  Even without the hidden object games, there is a great deal of variety with over six types of hotels, several additional buildings and structures and levels taking place across five settings including Egypt, Hawaii and South America.

Regular readers will probably be aware that ‘bright and eyecatching’ is a favourite phrase of mine and for good reason.  You can spend many hours playing a game and I believe bright and colourful games are much easier on the eye than dull, drab, brown and grey efforts.  Thankfully, Hotel Mogul gives me something to praise here too as it is very well illustrated and easy on the eye.

Tycoon games often struggle to find a balance between too easy and too difficult, too repetitive and too over complicated, too short and too lengthy.  Thankfully Hotel Mogul appears to have found an excellent balance: it’s straightforward, yet challenging and lengthy without being repetitive in its levels.  It’s great fun to play and the price tag of £9.99 means this is superb value for the many hours of play you’ll get out of it. 

**Review by Donna Haw**


Final score: 78%
RRP: £9.99