Jane, having achieved success in her line of clothing boutiques in Dress Up Rush, is back at the family business of running hotels. Jane’s Hotel 2: Family Hero follows a funny plotline — her grandma is about to lose all the hotels, so Jane has to borrow money to revamp each one and turn it around, with a certain number of days to pay back each loan. What’s especially funny is how little money it takes to buy and revamp a hotel. I never knew.
But no matter: you’re not really here for the story, are you? This one features a lot of the same customers as the ones who shopped in Jane’s clothing store, and as they come into the hotel and ask for amenities, your job is to meet all their requests before time runs out and they storm out angrily. You have to get them the key at the front desk, and then make sure their rooms are cleaned when they ask for them (and when they check out). You have a maid and a porter to assist with various jobs, but you have to tap on them to bring them out in order to assign them to a task.
Jane's Hotel 2: Open and ready for business
As you earn money and add features, guests will be able to sit in the lobby, drink coffee, take phone calls, eat at the little cafe, or get photos taken in the lobby. Nearly everything can be upgraded, which adds more clients who will come, more money per service, and more popularity. For the most part, though, the game plays a lot like Dress Up Rush. As clients come in or make requests, the thing they’re asking for will light up. You can tap on a series of things to chain together actions for Jane or the maid and porter, but it won’t let you click on something that hasn’t yet been requested. This is different from Stand O’ Food 3, for instance, where you can easily grab something off the wrong conveyor belt and be stuck holding the wrong ingredients. Jane and her staff can only do things that have been requested: the challenge is getting things in the right order so that nobody is stuck waiting for too long.
The game is only available for the iPhone — again, a free download with a $2.99 in-game unlock for the full version — and the graphics aren’t as crisp when you blow it up on the iPad. The game also seems a bit shorter: I managed to complete all of the hotels in just a few sessions. My kids liked watching me play this one, as one of them would control the porter and one would control the maid, so it definitely allows for that since each person is sort of working independently and has their own chain of actions to follow.
Overall, I thought it was okay but in my opinion it’s not as strong as the Stand O’ Food/Supermarket Mania line. The interface is just not quite as nice, though the addition of the maid and porter is an interesting touch.
