Bad Hotel

Bad Hotel is an interesting combination of music and tactics as its core gameplay is centered around rapidly generating profit to maintain your hotel while defending against multitudes of enemies attacking from the air and ground. It becomes plain to players that this product is artistic and combines that style into gameplay functions, which customarily infuriate some while enthralling others. Those interested in what Bad Hotel has to offer must take into account that said video game is brief, creative, and toilsome to an extent in its general difficulty and level gimmicks.

First of all don't take my word for it, read some of the professional reviews and whatnot. It's a good game, even in 2024. I just picked it up and finished it (had gotten halfway through, when I first got it on sale).

It's a solid tower defense game that [s]encourages[/s] .. Forces you to bend and adapt your defense strategies as you make your way through the levels. In each level you balance your income with your firepower with your ... survivability?

And yes, it's hectic at times, this isn't the type of game where you get to pause and ponder, rather give it a few whirls and after getting your hotel destroyed by your landlord a few times you start to get the jist of it.

Randomly generated music is not something anyone should have to listen to. If by some miracle you actually get a song that doesn't make your ears bleed, it'll just be covered up by water drops and guitar twangs the instant you add a new piece to the tower. Other than that it's just a mediocre defense game that should have stayed on mobile.

Save your money and loop the Resident Evil Mansion Basement theme to get the same experience.

I was interested by the bad reviews, so I tried this one out and liked it a good bit. You have to build buildings around a hotel that your co-owner and mafia jerk is trying to destroy for insurcance money. It's basically tower defense, but it has some nice variety with very level changing the formula a bit to keep things fresh. It's prety hard, too. For five bucks, it's a pretty neat little thing if you don't mind more repetitive stuff.

Editing after 16 hours. To be fair to this game I feel driven to get 100% and several of the achievements just require time.

I don’t think there is a difficulty curve. This game relies on too much RNG. The wave enemy type and number are set but random. What I mean is that enemies can show up on either side of your tower. This can have a profound effect on whether you win or lose.

It is very clear to me when something went wrong and I will lose the level but I still don’t feel like I know what I did wrong. That is not satisfying in a game. This is not like a Super Meat Boy or Dark Souls. It's a random wave generator that is designed to me maximally grating.

I still hate the levels where your only defense of the core hotel is building sacrificial rooms.

The random sounds are just that sounds, not music.

Original Review:
Very sharp difficulty curve towards the end of area 3/ the beginning of area 4 had me feeling like I passed a level out of sheer luck. This game had me extremely frustrated because I did not know what I am doing wrong. Playing the levels the same way yields different results. Room AI is slow at best. I felt like each level I just made it a little further and just memorized the wave and what buildings to place and when. Not a good mechanic for a tower defense in my opinion. I hate the levels where you cannot fight back and you need to place rooms to protect the center and that is all you can do. Again it felt like pure luck and this pissed me off a lot.

its not bad i think it is a lot bette ron the phone. playing it on the PC is alot harder and more annoying. all in all its like a 5/10 its not the best on the PC but its great on the phone

Super fast pace game that leaves no room for error on the harder levels, which is most of them. You'll be lucky to complete more than two levels in each world. You start with little funds to build & the pay rooms take too long to build enough capital for offencive rooms. The enemies never slow down & most of them destroy a room in one or two hits. The only reason to get this game is if it's in a bundle. The game is so frustrating you'll be uninstalling after a few rounds. There aren't any tooltips or hints as to what new rooms do, you have to figure out in-game & even then most of the rooms aren't obvious as to what they do. After the first world the difficulty curve shoots straight up & there's no way to adjust it, it's just hard for the sake of being hard & sucks any of the fun you were once having.

Maybe I shouldn't review a genre I don't really like, but this is a bad game. Some small artistic merit which I might even enjoy if it if it was easier and I could coast through it, but it's pretty frantic.

I took a chance on this one, and I regret it. I don't usually have a good time playing mobile games that get ported to Steam, and this one was no exception (although not for the usual reasons). The difficulty curve is beyond unforgiving. You get a level to get familiarized with the controls, and then it's basically straight into the crapstorm.

The premise of the game is that enemies come to attack the core of your hotel, and you must spend money to add rooms to the structure. Added rooms will serve as a temporary shield from some attacks, and depending on the type of room, will either shoot at enemies, heal damage to nearby rooms, or generate more money (you don't get access to every type of room on every stage). Adding a new room attaches it to one specific existing block of your building, and if a given block is destroyed, all the blocks that have been built off of it will (logically, but frustratingly) be destroyed along with it, effectively wasting all the money you spend building them.

You get just a few brief seconds at the start of a level to quickly tack on some minimal defense before waves of enemies come to start wrecking you. They come faster than your guns can fire, and some of them stay back and shoot at you from a distance. Your rooms will be destroyed faster than you can generate money to replace them. You will lose repeatedly.

At first I thought it was strange that you can access any stage in a given chapter, instead of having to play through them in linear sequence, but a linear setup would only allow most people to see one or two stages before they got fed up and quit. This setup lets you see five before you quit.

I thought it was a cool concept, and I'm 100% certain that it's POSSIBLE to beat every stage, but I just have too many games and not enough free time to spend hours repeatedly losing at the same frustrating level until I memorize patterns and build with enough speed and precision to limp along to the finish line (and do it over again for 20+ more stages). There's not enough meat in the gameplay or the story to keep me invested here.

The sound element billed as "procedural music" is a bit misleading as well. I wouldn't say that it doesn't "count" as music, but the musical element (at least in the chapters I've played) is more on par with a Simon game: a series of beeps that repeat and add a note each time you add a block, but the melody is abrasive.

I buyed this game because of the possitive reviews. I found that misguided after playing. The game has nothing wrong, but it's clearly not the big deal other comments state here; it's just an ok game and that's it.

They said this game had an innovative relation with sound, and i found it messy at best: it's just boring noise. Its strange concept of hotel defense is also overrated in the possitive comments. Just another average defense game.

Maybe it's a good game for tablets or phones, but i would not recommend this for playing on a computer.

this game is a pretty worthless piece of shit. don't waste your money on this game. If you do, and you realize how pathetic it is, I TOLD YOU SO

Bad Hotel is a very strange tower defense game...if you can even call it that. You are doing what you can to protect your hotel by adding blocks to it that either shoots, gives you more money or other helpful things. The mechanics are based a lot on a beat so the closer to your hotel you build something the sooner the beat will reach it to trigger it but on many levels this can be overlooked and its more important to build the right block then the placement of it (in my personal experience). Not a game I can recommend as it feels quite shallow and very "meh" in lack of better words.

Most achievements are tied to beating the boss in each zone and if you are only in it for achievements you can just skip all other levels and only do the boss fights. There are some major grinds in the game, but thankfully one of them (100,000 rounds fired) can be done while idle if you build things correctly, follow the guide in the community hub for ideas).

Time to 100%: 3-5 hours (depending on luck)

So I buy this game for linux and they messed it up so I couldn't even play it for the first several weeks I owned it, should've taken the hint and wiped it from my computer then. The game is a great idea executed poorly. The musical aspect of it never comes to life as you're never given enough time to place things in a concise manner that would allow for such. The tower defense aspect is also executed poorly, as you're rushed frantically by enemies in such a way that no strategy is involved. You just need to stack your rooms on faster than the enemies destroy them which creates awkward jumbled beats. All in all Bad Hotel has been an extremely disappointing experience.

Alright. I read a lot of reviews for this game, and the most frequent comment I've heard is that the game's difficulty curve is all over the place. I'm inclined to agree. Once you get past the tutorial, the game almost seems to award victory randomly. Idk what the mechanics are, but sometimes a level will be neigh on impassible and then suddenly it's a walk in the park.

Another criticism I saw was that the game doesn't function the way it's supposed to both in terms of a tower defense and in terms of a music based game. I would also have to agree on that point as well. In boss battles, the game is pretty much unwinnable unless you blitz down the boss with your biggest cannons in the first three seconds. Obviously pretty counterintuitive for a tower defense to force the player to go fully on the offensive. Enraged enemies make your buildings expendable, but their price doesn't seem to accurately reflect this (even with healing rooms, they tear through everything anyways and then you're just stuck with one less money producer in addition to being out 50 credits).

In terms of music generation, I wasn't exactly expecting Bastion level sound track, but it is just notes rippling out from your hotel every second or so. Kinda reminded me of Pikmin or maybe some other Nintendo game I can't remember. While other people seemed to be more upset about the lack of musicality, I was not so critical; however, I did find the "music" in stage three very irritating. Fortunately by that time, all my steam cards had dropped so I could stop playing and uninstall.

All in all, I was pretty disapponted with the game and was somewhat surprised to see so much similar disdain in reviews posted by other Steam members. If the game has any redeeming quality at all, it's the idea that you can make funny shapes like swords or faces or names and upload some amusing screenshots. Other than that, I regretfully admit that I wouldn't recommend purchasing this game.

Confusing, garish, and designed for tablets rather than PCs. I love tower defence and I love music games, but this doesn't really rate as either - I have no idea what the reviewers were thinking to generate all those glowing quotes, but they were wrong.

The best way to describe this game is "Bad Hotel is to Missile Command as Populous is to Warcraft". You don't actually control the fire, but you can place the bases. And much like Missile Command was in its day, Bad Hotel is a vivid, psychedelic trip through waves of paranoia.

In an age where 99.9% of games described as "atmospheric" tend to be nothing more than blue-green forest hues, gratuitous mist, and Yanni music, Bad Hotel actually manages to create a mood through pure feeling alone. The gameplay becomes almost an incidental afterthought - actions come from the subconscious, reactionary actions that juxtapose nicely with the reactionary hyper-capitalist philosophies sprouted by the Libertarian Monster Manager From Hell who conspires to destroy your hotel for the insurance money.

The supposed "learning curve" is ridiculously quick, the basic gist can easily be picked up in ten minutes. Build rooms to make money and act as meatshields, build cannons to fire at stuff. The resulting music is something that evolves on its own (although I'm quite sure there will eventually be Youtubes of crazy Japanese dudes (they're always Japanese) who somehow manage to use the primitive music engine to recreate Bohemian Rhapsody in its entirety). The songs that are more likely to be created sound like anything from Goblin (legendary Dawn of the Dead composers) or Can to Henry Mancini / Dick DeBenedictis scores of the 60s and 70s spy movies and mystery thrillers, with the preset undercurrent evoking segments of Super Metroid. Minimalist, but not the uninspiring droning minimalism of Yanni or his new age ilk.

Anyone who approaches this game as a min-maxing optimization exercise (as I suspect most of those who bîtch about the alleged "learning curve" do) is using the wrong parts of their brain. It's the same as those who try to play Starcraft like a city-builder or Settlers-clone and get completely destroyed.

Bad Hotel manages to take extremely simple, borderline-mindless game mechanics and elevate it to one of the most intense, vivid gaming experiences I can remember having. Aside from a misplaced apostrophe or two (it's "its", not "it's", when dealing with a possessive) and the fact that it seems to have started out on iOS (a truly wretched platform for truly wretched users and developers alike), it's golden - and well-worth the price tag for those who can approach it with the Speedrun part of their brain turned off.

OVERALL: 46%
Gameplay & Controls: 2/5 ♥s
Graphics & Visuals: 2/5 ♥s
Music & Audio: 3/5 ♥s

In writing this review, I'm assuming that most people who are drawn to Bad Hotel were wowed by the haunting music and surreal experience they saw pictured in the trailer, as I was. In short, I'm here to regretfully inform you that the truth behind the matter is that the only thing "insane" about this tower defense hybrid is its learning curve. It's almost safe to say that if Bad Hotel were an RPG, the creators of Dark Souls would be taking note.

-Gameplay & Controls-
Bad Hotel plays out in a rather straight-forward fashion: as the manager of a hotel in an unexplicably hospitable vacation destination, you must strategically construct rooms to keep your building intact for a specified period of time. Certain rooms garner certain abilities, with some giving your hotel an increased source of income while others come equipped with missiles or gravity-defying mines to blow away any miscreant who happens to attempt an assault on your futuristic space Marriott. Although the first several levels serve as a basic and relatively easy introduction to the room types, the player is subsequently dropped into a boss fight with rage-inducing difficulty, forced to watch their pastel pixelated polygons repeatedly destroyed over and over again without any indication as to how you are supposed to be constructing a "sound" hotel. (That pun was entirely unintentional, and I only recognized its genius upon rereading that sentence.) Assuming you decide to keep playing after this point, you'll find several more sets of levels during which one's annoyance with Bad Hotel will range from that of watching the Star Wars prequels to being forcefully confined to a small room where the only source of light comes from a television playing Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on loop for 24 hours. If that sounds like your cup of tea, then by all means, go ahead; it is still a playable and fully functional game, but I think I'd be lying if I said I enjoyed my time with Bad Hotel.

-Graphics & Visuals-
Graphically, the game isn't much to look at. As previously mentioned, the game is basically comprised of pastel shapes over a background with a slightly unnerving pallet, whereas the enemies in Bad Hotel largely seem to consist of pixelated gulls and some very aggressive clouds. It never quite gives off the effect that one originally perceived it would have from the trailers, instead going for a manner that not only neglects to fully please but fails to live up to the hype. However, what graphics there are do appear to compliment whatever misunderstood direction the game actually takes, so I suppose that counts for something.

-Audio & Music-
This is my biggest gripe about Bad Hotel. If there were ever a case of false advertising by companies porting questionable mobile tower defense games, then this would be the one. What I neglected to mention earlier in my review is that this game serves a dual purpose in that it is also a procedural music generator. What this means for the consumer, however, is that the haunting, chilling tones from the game's trailer which made it sound so deliciously appealing in the first place are nowhere to be found, instead replaced with a selection of noises that in Lucky Frame's perspective better suited their pixelated amalgamation. Still, I did find myself on occassion putting more effort into creating vividly pleasing sounds than attempting to clear a level, so some points have to be awarded for ingenuity. While the creation of musical undertones through the building process is actually rather rewarding in its own way, I can't help but feel that Lucky Frame regrettably missed the mark on this one, if simply because Bad Hotel gives away an entirely different experience than the one that had been promised.

-Final Thoughts-
Well, there you have it -- my two cents on Bad Hotel. While I admittedly have not spent a large portion of time on the game, I feel that the impression I received was strong enough to justify such opinions. If I happen to play the game for a longer stretch (although I'm not quite sure how anyone could spend a considerable amount of time on the game, as despite its difficulty it appears rather short) and decide that any part of my initial review is unjustified, I'll reexamine my editorial. Until such a time, however, I leave you with the final statement that I ultimately was more entertained watching the trailer for Bad Hotel than I was actually playing Bad Hotel. If that impacts your purchase, than so be it.

Bad Hotel is pretty bad. It's a hectic game, with not enough breathing room between waves and a stupidly weird difficulty spike at the end of world 2. Plus, simplistic, childish graphics do not equal 'art'. It's a weird idea, and let me tell you that weird games can be some of the best games out there, but this one just doesn't work. I can see it working on an iPhone (like it originally did), but for us PC gamers there are so many other tower defense games out there that are just so much better in its execution.

[Rating: 52/100]

Buggy beyond belief. Pause the game, it crashes. Play the game normally, your hotel blows up with no enemies on-screen. And when it's not glitching up and force-closing itself, the game itself becomes too difficult too quickly. Case in point, 2-5. It's hard. And then 40 enemies spawn out of nowhere and if you don't have 10 rooms already up, you lose immediately. As for the game when it's fun AND working, the gimmick behind the procedural music generated by your room placement is fundamentally flawed. Yes, they make unique sounds to the beat of the stage's ambience. No, the sounds don't work with eachother. And once you've got way too many things on-screen that you have to fight off, it's just noise. Dings and buzzes and maybe a hint of bass and recycled sounds from Anodyne. The trailer looked good, it really did. And I even got into a Wu-Tang Clan argument in the community hub, which was nice. But buying this game was a grave mistake. Do not get this.

This game is very unplesant to play. It might be more fun on a tablet, but on a PC, it's awkward and confusing. I do not recommend this game.

It's bad enough that it's the first and only time I ever asked Steam for a refund.

They politely declined. :-/