Hotel Giant 2 is an ancient game from 2010. It's a whopping 14 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for the typical features of modern gaming PCs, hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on contemporary machines. The game looks and feels dated. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an old game. This seems to have be lingering on Steam with an inflated price to try profit from abandonware.

It's a hotel tycoon game as the name says, build and manage hotels, sort out the facilities, attract guests, balance the chequebooks... these games can work quite well and be very popular if they're implemented well. Which this isn't.

On the upside, the game does feature customisable controls and resolution, so at least some of the basic, minimum requirements have been met. Unfortunately there's a number of other technical defects and shortcomings which contribute to the game being difficult to recommend to gamers.

From my experience with the game, it's somewhat bug riddled and has design/implementation/stability problems that will render this unplayable for many gamers. There's a lot of issues with stability, poor compatibility with modern builds of Windows 10/11... it can be a challenge to even get the game to run, and the developer shows no interest in maintaining the game (but they do want your money!)

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Hotel Giant 2 has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for building a nice restaurant, trivial to achieve, but less than 8 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.

The game never really caught on with the millions of gamers on Steam, with a very low peak player count close to launch, and then just a handful of players launching this game every couple of days. This is undoubtedly caused by factors such as those raised in this review. It's always helpful with buying decisions to consider how popular and successful the product is, and unfortunately while this did accumulate a few participation trophy reviews, overall, people just aren't using it.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

Hotel Giant 2 is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $8 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again.

For comparison, the $8 asking price for this game could get you games like "The Witcher 2", "Batman: Arkham Asylumn" or "Shadow Warrior". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.