Hotel Dash: Suite Success

 A laptop and an hour of free time every lunch break. Turns out, those things are all I needed to finish the game's 50 levels in just less than two weeks.

One of the latest incarnations of the DASH family (Diner Dash, Cooking Dash and Wedding Dash all ring a bell?), Hotel Dash: Suite Success is set in the hospitable world of hotel management. Apparently, running a restaurant and even cooking the meals weren't enough for Flo who wanted to put her Bachelor of Science in HRM to good use.

The gameplay isn't as addictive as its Dash cousins but it fortunately can stand on its own, although I must admit that it gets repetitive after a while. The task is simple: put hotel guests in their color coded rooms, deliver items like food, towels or extra pillows then successfully check them out just in time for the arrival of new guests. Oh, and we cannot forget to clean up the messy spills all those clowns can make while running around the place.

Though creative and amusing enough, the game lacks the unpredictability and diversity of actions of the other Dash franchises. It also isn't challenging enough for time management addicts like me who is looking for something to keep my neurons up and awake (although probably not as hard as the last levels of Cooking Dash: DinerTown Studios where I'm still stuck at Level 45).

The irony is, there were times when it felt that the game was trying too hard, introducing sleepwalking visitors, wake up calls and even ghosts as hotel guests, which made the whole thing feel over-the-top while being underwhelming at the same time. My guess is that with a few more tweaks in the creativity department, Hotel Dash 2 will be just what its predecessor had implied, a success.