Maximum Capacity: Hotel Giant is a hotel building and management sim that lets you try your hand at creating a profitable hotel, or building a hotel empire.  The hotels in the game run the gamut from small bed & breakfasts to large resort hotels and casinos - a total of nineteen different hotel types in all.  But Maximum Capacity is designed to be more than just another tycoon-style game; it fills your hotel with guests that can be spied on as they go about their activities in an attempt to play upon the voyeuristic nature of gamers.

Gameplay in Maximum Capacity centers on the design of your hotel's rooms and facilities.  While you'll often be given an existing hotel in need of a facelift, you can start with empty floor plans and build your hotel from scratch.  Those of you with an architectural bent should be aware of the fact that the game does not allow you to design hotel exteriors or floor plans (other than interior walls) - it exists strictly in the realm of interior decorators.  However, you budding decorators out there will find plenty to do in Maximum Occupancy.  The game boasts over 600 objects that can be used to create the perfect bedrooms, business centers, bars, restaurants, and other rooms found in hotels.  In addition, you'll be able to select from a variety of floor and wall textures that will help you to achieve the perfect look that you are going for.

It is possible to select objects from various categories - furniture, fixtures, and the like - to give rooms an overall theme, but the objects are not identified or linked in any way to give the decorator-challenged any help in making the rooms pleasing to the eye.  Aesthetics do not seem to matter to the hotel guests, though, so if your rooms look like they were assembled from the flotsam of a hundred garage sales it won't really count against you.

What does count against you, though, is the game's non-intuitive and tricky to master interface.  You'll need to prepare yourself for a long learning period of incorrect mouse clicks as you try to get the game into the right mode for you to accomplish whatever it is you are trying to do - and that's even if you do spend time making your way through the game's tutorials.  There just doesn't seem to be any consistent logic behind the control layout.  What's more is that the mouse actions during room layout functions don't always act consistently.  Sometimes you'll find a click that is supposed to place an object rotating it instead - the impatient and easily frustrated need not apply.  The building interface is not all bad.  A nice feature of the game is that you can save your designs as room layouts.  You'll need to spend time laying out the first room, but after that you can stamp out copies of the room cookie cutter style to fill your hotel.

The game itself can be played in campaign or random game mode.  In the campaign mode, you are given a series of scenarios of increasing difficulty, each with a set of goals that must be accomplished before moving on to the next scenario.  These goals require that your hotel meet certain requirements - satisfaction rating, financial success, occupancy, etc. - within a given period of time.  The random game mode allows you to set your own goals and time limit, and to specify whether you will start with an existing hotel or a clean slate.

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