App Of The Week: Bad Hotel

In a nutshell:

Bad Hotel is a tower defence game for iOS where you must build a hotel and protect it from dive-bombing seagulls and spaceships, while everything you do creates the soundtrack.

Why we like it:

Bad Hotel is exactly what we want from a mobile game - quick to start, simple to understand, challenging and addictive, with the added musical element that means the soundtrack is different every single time you play.

The aim of the game is to protect the central part of your hotel from attack by building rooms strategically around it. Some of these rooms shoot at the birds which are trying to drop bombs on your hotel, while others explode to fend off attacks from the ground; others simply make money.

Starting each level with limited resources, your job is to build the hotel as large as possible - more rooms means earning money more quickly - while incorporating the various guns and bombs to keep the hotel safe.

Developer Lucky Frame says: "You are a budding entrepreneur, whose hotel is rather unfortunately located within the territory of Tarnation Tadstock, the Texas Tyrant. Your only defense against Tadstock's army of seagulls, rats, yetis, and more is to build your hotel as quickly and intelligently as possible, using an array of increasingly sophisticated weapons."

Like we said, it's a tower defense game, but there's a musical element that makes Bad Hotel much more than that.

Each type of room plays its own musical sequence, and this sequence varies on where you place the room, how large your hotel is, and how damaged each part becomes from the various attacks.

The music starts as a rhythmic electric beat, which evolves and gets quicker as you build, with warning alarms sounding when rooms become damaged; the music changes later in the game to "country banjo technic," whatever that is.

Bad Hotel is split up into five different worlds, each containing five levels of increasing difficulty, before offering up a boss level at the end of each world.

The first few levels can be completed easily by placing rooms and guns haphazardly around the central building, but by the end of the first world you need to pay more attention and build intelligently.

It's a compromise between building solely with rooms to generate the most money, against installing guns, bombs and rooms with bedroom-healing abilities to ensure your hotel can survive the level in one piece.

As you progress through the game more rooms and guns become available, with five bedrooms increasing in prices both to buy and rent out, five gun rooms, and five mine launchers all eventually becoming available to use.

Graphically, Bad Hotel is simplistic with a heavy use of pastel colours and fonts that reflect the game's Texas setting.

The only issue we found was with placing rooms, the game would often drop them a long way from where we touched the screen, resulting in a hotel looking like it's endured a week of teenagers in Magaluf. That small issue aside, Bad Hotel is well worth the tiny price.

Bad Hotel is available now for iPhone and iPad, costing 69p.