Hotel Transylvania: Serve ghosts, skeletons and more in Sony's Hotel City clone
In anticipation of Sony Pictures' upcoming film Hotel Transylvania, Sony Pictures Interactive has released a Facebook game by the same name: the Hotel Transylvania Social Game. At first glance, Hotel Transylvania on Facebook feels like a Hotel City clone, for those that remember Playfish's failed Facebook game. Unfortunately, it comes with a few general design issues that keep the game from being an instant Halloween classic.
At the beginning of Hotel Transylvania, you'll be placed in charge of a small hotel and just a couple of guest rooms, but can quickly expand the hotel into something grand, adding more individual rooms and suites alongside attractions like dining rooms, pools, bars and more. You can customize individual rooms with beds, tables, lamps and decorations, but you won't be able to complete any other tasks without using your zombie employees.
Zombies, given their fragile nature, have limited amounts of "life," which counts down with each individual task they carry out, ranging from checking in guests to bringing room service, carrying bags and so on. This is easily the worst part of Hotel Transylvania, as the zombies walk far too slowly (even if that's understandable, given that they're zombies), and you'll have more tasks to complete than zombies available to actually complete them at any one time.
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Making matters worse, each type of creature, whether it be a skeleton, ghost, frog man or bat girl (as examples), takes a different amount of time to complete their own tasks, so you'll have guests waiting in the lobby for free guest rooms and attractions that are being held hostage by a few particularly needy guests.
The game's slow progress isn't just due to the limited number of zombies you'll have under your employ, as building a new room takes at least an hour, and if you're not willing to spend Hypnosis points (the game's premium currency) to speed them up, you'll be stuck with a single guest room and tons of angry customers even at the very beginning of the game. Needless to say, the new user experience in Hotel Transylvania: Social Game leaves a lot to be desired, and the very short length allowed for each gameplay session doesn't help.
Still, the game's graphics are clever and as we've been without Hotel City for so long, it is nice to see this kind of gameplay come back to Facebook, even with its flaws. Hopefully, the game will climb in popularity between now and Halloween, encouraging Sony Pictures Interactive to make the necessary changes to make the game great.
Click here to try Hotel Transylvania Social Game on Facebook ---->
What do you think of this new, Halloween-themed version of Hotel City on Facebook? Sound off in the comments!
