Hotel Dash: Suite Success Review

In the new installment of PlayFirst’s dash series, Hotel Dash: Suite Success, Quinn decides to expand her wedding business by offering honeymoons. But the hotel business can be more complicated than one thinks, with rundown estates, sabotages, ghosts, and guests who do not get along with each other. Why you have to enjoy this new game with a pinch of salt will be explained in this review.

Hotel Dash: Suite Success features two different modes: story and endless. Story consists of five different hotels with ten levels each, in which you always have to earn a specific amount of money to proceed, and an even higher amount to reach the expert goal. The point of the endless mode is to survive as long as possible. In each of those five hotels you can choose between three levels of difficulty and can afford to lose five guests until the game ends. More experienced players will be very glad about the endless mode, because the story mode lacks any challenge known from previous similar titles.

The click management gameplay resembles former dash games (such as Diner Dash or Wedding Dash), but features some interesting new twists. Guests will wait near the entrance for you to drop them onto one of the free rooms of your hotel. If you match the color of a guest’s clothes and the color of the room, you will earn bonus money that can be used to buy upgrades along with your other earnings.

On top of the money you can also earn stars by upgrading rooms. Let’s say you upgrade one room with one star – in this case you will earn one star each time when a guest checks out of this room. These stars can be used to upgrade one VIP-room in every hotel, but unfortunately those upgraded VIP-rooms have no influence on the actual gameplay.

Elevators connecting different floors are the main new feature of Hotel Dash: Suite Success, which Flo, Quinn and the other guests have to use to move inside the hotels. Different services, items, and rooms are on different floors, which simply means that the elevators are the key element in every hotel for handling the requests of guests. On top of that Flo is privileged when it comes to using the elevator, so that guests have to wait for it on a regular basis. Fortunately you can also upgrade a cart for Flo which enables her to carry up to six things at the same time to shorten her ways as much as possible.

Flo has to fulfill numerous requests for the guests, such as carrying their suitcases, delivering food, towels, or pillows, checking out, or making wake up calls. Apart from that there are also disasters to avert, which will be familiar from the Wedding Dash series, and those disasters are actually the only situations where Quinn is brought into action. I think it is a pity to include such an important character of DinerTown in a game, and then to barely use her.

The variety of guest types has even increased compared to former dash games, and this feature sets Hotel Dash: Suite Success apart from other time management games. These guest types differ in their patience, their preferences and their behaviors, and it really takes some time to get used to those differences and to incorporate those in your own strategy. VIP guests won’t let other guests go past their rooms if they stand outside waiting for something, ghosts will spook other guests, don’t use the elevator and don’t eat, while the fashionista brings along three suitcases instead of one.

Particularly because of the large number of features, twists, guest types, and tasks I really don’t know why this game has become the easiest of all dash games. It is possible to breeze through the story mode easily and reaching expert goal at first try in every level, without developing any special strategy. Thus the reward of finally beating a very tricky level is completely lacking, which will be a great disappointment to many players without a doubt. However, the pace of the game is still quite fast, so that you will at least feel entertained despite the easiness.

Apart from this lack of challenge, the game delivers the usual dash experience, without irritating bugs, a charming storyline, and adorable graphics. When it comes to quality time management games with quirky stories and interesting twists, PlayFirst still is the company to look at. Hotel Dash: Suite Success is as polished as it could be and will meet the expectations of most dash fans. The endless mode somewhat compensates for the easy story mode, so that there is also a challenge for the more experienced players.