The game looks and feels like any other similar game: there is limited space that you can build in and three types of “rooms” that you can construct: guest rooms, attractions and decorations. The idea is to fit and match, as there are also “collections” or achievements unlocked for cool rewards once you complete them. As an example of such an achievement, building a set of Asian-themed rooms and decorations unlocks an achievement.
Although these challenges do offer something extra and reasons to plan the building of your rooms in hotels – because you can own more than one in Monopoly Hotels, as opposed to the classic way of expanding in other games – EA’s title fails in some other major categories.
The most frustrating thing, at least early on in the game, is the lack of money combined with the insane waiting times: after 5 or 10 minutes of gameplay, you’re already stuck on the “wait xx minutes for room to be ready,” you already have no money left and this does ruin the fun in any game. Of course, this could also mean that you could choose to pay real cash to speed things up, but usually developers give you room to get hooked before taking your money. In Monopoly Hotels, you reach the wall before you are even given the chance to become an addict.
I also had the game crash several times during my play on a Samsung Galaxy S2 and even though I know that game crashes on a device don’t mean that the game crashes everywhere, but in my case it was extremely annoying and added an extra thumbs down to the game.
The only good thing about Monopoly Hotels is that it is available as a free download, so you lose nothing but several minutes if you try to play it. Apart from that, though, it really is not the best game on the market. This unless you are good at the waiting game!
Final rating: 2 out of 5
