Jane has a dream to build and run a 5 star hotel and win the contest of the best hotel in the town. To do this she will need to take her 2 star hotel and make a huge success of it by making customers happy, upgrading and working as hard as she can to gain more stars and improve her hotels until she gets her dream 5 star hotel.
Jane’s Hotel is a time management game from Beatshapers. You take control of Jane who wants to fulfil her dream of having a 5 star hotel and win the best hotel contest in her town. Helping Jane out in her hotel business is the maid who cleans rooms and presses suits amongst other things. It starts off nice and slow in the 2 star hotel with a small flurry of demanding customers wanting drinks and newspapers and their rooms cleaned. As you work your way through the 40 levels of the game, the customers get needier and if your not careful with your time, watching the customers mood levels and the tasks in hand. you will end up with a queue of disgruntled customers.
Starting the game you will be presented with an overview of the town. The starting point is the 2 star hotel, level 1 of 1. Each level takes you to the interior of the hotel where you will be greeting your customers, assigning them rooms and making sure that they are happy. You will need to keep an eye on the timers and icons that show up next to the customers, the longer a customer waits the timer will start to turn red as they get angrier and eventually they will leave the hotel in a huff which takes points from your popularity meter. Popularity points are important in the game as it earns you more tips from satisfied customers. More tips mean you will reach your financial goal quicker and have more money to upgrade your hotels with items like coffee machines or plants.
Selecting objects in the game is easy enough by using the d-pad and highlighting the objects but once more items are added to the hotel and more customers are asking for things it becomes quite a chore. If a customer wants a coffee you will first need to highlight and select the coffee machine and then highlight and select the customer. If Jane isn’t busy she will give the customer the coffee straight away, if she is busy giving a customer a newspaper or a meal a tick will appear on the coffee machine to show it is pending and once Jane’s hands are free she will serve the coffee. If there are, say 5 customers and you have two sat in front of reception and three waiting in their hotel room it can become very difficult to select items and customers and considering it is a time management game you can lose valuable seconds and patience trying to select objects in the latter parts of the game when customers are getting thrown at you from left right and centre with crazy requests.
Graphically the game isn’t bad with cartoon style graphics and it suits the game pretty well and with the sound of lift music playing in the background it all seems to fit in quite well to the hotel setting.
Overall Jane’s Hotel is not a bad mini title at all and in the first levels of the game you will find yourself addicted. Halfway through the game things could start feeling repetitive with every level being basically the same but with a different lick of paint. Nearing the end of the game it could all start to feel a bit frustrating and a bit of a chore especially once you have a lot of demanding customers and you start having trouble selecting things. If you can get past this little niggle you will happily pass hours on the game without even realising it.
6/10
Jane’s Hotel is out for the Playstation Vita, Playstation Portable and the Playstation 3.