Million Onion Hotel (Android) Review

Million Onion Hotel tasks you with creating a row of five onions. This is accomplished in a sort of whack-a-mole manner, hitting onions as they appear to create a row of five. Onions appear randomly, and once you create a single row, a clock appears. Hit that clock, and gain extra time. Run out of time, and the game's all over.

What makes Million Onion Hotel so special is what happens as time goes on. Creating two rows simultaneously unleashes a storm of fruit pieces to add to your score. As time goes on, more types of "enemies" appear, like a brush that, if not thwarted, will delete an already claimed space. This further complicates creating rows, and therefore, stalls levelling up.

Levelling up is simple, as it occurs every time a row is successfully made. At level ten, a short scene plays out, showing some of Million Onion Hotel's delightfully weird story. At level twenty, a boss fight ensues. This pattern seems to continue steadily as levels are climbed, though this is partially speculative. This humble reviewer was never able to make it to level 100 (though that's the new goal).

This is, honestly, a failure, not on the game, but on the participant. Million Onion Hotel is a frantic title, but from a technical standpoint, it works exactly like it's supposed to. There are no frame rate drops, presses responded exactly how they are supposed to; in short, everything works wonderfully. This title definitely falls into the "when you fail, it's your fault" category.

The mayhem is part of the game's charm. It answers a lot of life's toughest questions, like what would happen if asparagus had faces? The frantic chaos that comes with sending literal onion knights to assault a giant mechanical onion is sublime, and thanks to the game's insistence on using a traditional grid format, even the greatest degrees of technicolour bedlam are easy enough to grasp. New mechanics are never explained, yet just by making Million Onion Hotel so maddeningly accessible, they really don't need to be. Still, there is a lot of depth here - it's on par with an older console or PC title (not an RPG, though) in terms of depth - and this makes it one of the best mobile titles available.

While it is great, it's not perfect. One of the most frustrating things is that the story is always revealed in the same order. It can be annoying to have to repeat the same story points after a long run, only failing because things got too chaotic and you lost track of time. Equally frustrating is having to stomp on the same bosses in the same order, but there's something wonderful about this, too. See, the bosses can escape, so getting another chance to curb stomp them is pretty exciting, especially when it's so soon (depending on how far you have to re-traverse). Still, the bosses being able to escape is also a curious decision - not that it detracts from the fun too much. Honestly, it's one of those evils that would be missed if it was gone.