Hotel Dash

There are chains of hotels up and down the land these days where you never need to interact with any other person during your stay if you so wish.

You can book your room online, order your meals before you turn up, check-in via touchscreen computer in reception and leave by dropping your keycard into a box on the way out.

All that patter with receptionists, cleaners and other assorted staff that used to be required is long gone – you can now keep yourself to yourself from beginning to end. It's almost like staying at home.

Hotel Dash doesn't quite strip back to this level of impersonality, but thanks to the nature of time management sims it's not far off.

As with previous PlayFirst games, speed takes precedence over quality of service; meeting a customer's needs in quick time before ushering them back out again the mantra from start to finish.

You could even go as far as to suggest that the Diner Dash model has been copied and pasted: food orders are replaced with carrying luggage, dropping off towels and picking up dirty laundry. Customers arrive at the reception desk and it's your duty to make their stay an enjoyable one.

With early activities revolving around carrying up luggage to the appropriate rooms, meeting room service orders, delivering fresh linen and taking away soiled sheets, each action is met simply by touching the object in question. Thankfully, you can schedule future actions even when you're engaged in another.

Of course, the context of the actions themselves matter little. Like all time management games, competing in Hotel Dash is a question of reading symbols and signs at speed, then tapping the appropriate objects in the right order as quickly as you can. Just what you're doing as a result is meaningless.

As such, it's fair to say there's nothing fresh about Hotel Dash. The only real distinct quality is the increase in tempo that occurs during gameplay.

Beyond the opening tutorial stage, Hotel Dash is something of a non-stop rollercoaster, with order after order thrown at you with almost no reprieve. It's a notably harder task earlier on than most other time management releases.

Of course, when you manage to pull it off, the smell of success is even sweeter than usual and the rewards – from upgrading furniture to upping the star quality of the room so you can charge more – just keep coming.

Home away from home

Hotel Dash masterfully keeps the overall challenge in touch with the upgrades that head your way. Rewards are never completely out of reach, but by the same token, managing the day-to-day management of your hotel is never breezy either.

Managing to keep such a finite balance throughout only comes with experience, and Hotel Dash is yet further evidence that PlayFirst has the art of time management down pat.

Nonetheless, the question of whether the publisher should therefore be aiming higher with its releases rather than simply transplanting a proven model into a new setting remains high on the agenda.

Hotel Dash is a nice tonic for a weekend away, but you might want to look for something a little edgier when planning your next trip.