The most important things in
Jane’s Hotel 2: Family Hero HD are the upgrades and furniture that you can purchase between levels. Upgrades include things like a speed boost for the maid, the porter or even Jane herself. For the maid, you can also purchase a speedier vacuum and a watering can that cuts down on the number of times you have to water the flowers. The porter’s upgrades include a faster camera that earns more money per photo taken and speedier repairing ability. Furniture upgrades are things that alter the decorative appearance of your hotel and not only make it more pleasant to look at, but allow you to serve more clients, make your hotel more popular, make your patrons more patient and or earn you extra money. These can be anything from statues that guests can be photographed by, to flowers that improve the mood (but also need regular watering), to a nice table where guests can dine. Every upgrade you buy means more money, but also more work because the porter, the maid and Jane herself will have more tasks since there are more options for guests to request.
All of the control in Jane’s Hotel 2: Family Hero HD is done with the finger tap or swipe. To activate Jane, simply tap on the item (phone, newspaper, coffee) you want her to deliver and then tap on the person she needs to bring it to. Jane can carry two items at a time, but one nifty trick is to pick up coffee in one hand and newspaper in the other, for instance, and then drop off coffee to several people, then drop off newspapers. As long as you don’t break the chain and have people requesting those items, you don’t have to return to restock. She magically has enough to supply them.
Where control gets crazy is in the U.I. where you select tasks for the maid and porter. It’s a dial-shaped area, with the different tasks as buttons and you will tap a certain task type to get them to do that task, then tap the guest they need to serve. Sometimes it takes two taps to activate the maid or porter and sometimes it takes a couple of taps to get them to serve the guest. This gets troublesome when your screen is covered with tasks to do and you tapped to do a task, but the game didn’t recognize the tap. That leads to an angry guest and lost bonus money. It didn’t happen all the time, but it happened enough to be annoying.
As you purchase upgrades, you will also encounter breakdowns on some items such as the telephone, the statue (where photos are taken), the dining room/kitchen, the coffee maker and even the souvenir shop. To fix these, you must send the porter to repair them, but as you progress and earn more money, you can sometimes buy more expensive items that don’t break. However, don’t get too comfortable, because as soon as you buy an unbreakable item, something else decides to break. It’s just like owning a home!
During the fourth area, France, Jane’s Hotel 2: Family Hero HD introduces something else – a hotel that is larger than the viewing screen. Yikes, this makes things more difficult. You’ll see a red arrow pointing in the direction of a needy customer, so you’ll scroll using your finger to get to the other side and then take care of them. This works fine if you keep your screen focused on either the extreme left or right. But if you center the screen, I found that, at times, it didn’t tell me when someone was just outside of my visible screen and that led to impatient guests who were being overlooked.
In between levels, you can Level Up or Stay. Choosing Level Up will allow you to buy upgrades and furniture and choosing Stay just puts you into the next level. When you have paid off the loan for a particular location, you can move on to the next episode or keep playing in that level. Once I beat the game, my only options were to reset the game or keep playing. When I opted to keep playing, it allowed me to purchase all of the upgrades left for France, but I couldn’t go back and buy additional upgrades in the previous areas to keep playing. Once you decide to move on to a new location, you can’t go back. In fact, you can’t ever go back and look at the map screen. So just be sure you are ready to leave an area when you move on to the next location.
Overall, Jane’s Hotel 2: Family Hero is a fun time management game. I found it to be over a bit too quickly and that it had some control issues. However, if you like time management games, you’ll have fun with it.
