Ever since the old days of playing Diner Dash on a variety of platforms, I’ve been a fan of the casual time management genre. Challenging yourself to not just fulfill your work, but then looking for any ways to optimize your paths and effectiveness to maximize your score, can be rewarding work and a nice challenge at times. While the venue and your tasks may be different in Hotel Hustle, it’s ultimately in the same general vein, but I found that its overall design doesn’t quite match up.

You, and optionally a friend, will work in a hotel cleaning crew, looking to prep rooms for guests, check them in, and then keep things flowing the best you can. Everything from vacuuming up hair, to cleaning up toilets, to changing the sheets, and even providing some room service will be put on your plate and the clock is always ticking. In order to perform each task you’ll generally need to return to your cart, drop whatever piece of equipment you’re using, grab the next one, and then run off to do more.

The problem is that your potential clients run out of patience pretty quickly, and given the distances you’ll need to cover to perform each action on each room, always needing to burn more time returning to the cart. Especially when playing solo this makes the game feel like it is stacked against you. Even in co-op you may have a generally easier time of each working on different rooms and tasks to keep things moving better, but it’s all of the required running back and forth, without any ways to really optimize, that brings the experience down.

Granted, I’m not saying you won’t generally be able to finish levels and move on to the next, the game is pretty generous about leaving you enough total time to be successful. The problem is, if you’re like me when you play these games you really want to get full stars whenever you can, and in this case, especially solo, there are stages where I simply don’t see it happening very well, or at least not in a very satisfying way. Typically it’s the ability to strategically stack tasks, fulfilling more than one as you move back and forth, that’s satisfying, but your lack of versatility in the game actively stands in the way of that the majority of the time. It may be a different take on the subgenre, but I wouldn’t say it’s a very good one.