Jane is back for Jane’s Hotel Mania, the third part in this popular time management series. Once again, it’s up to you to serve guests quickly in different hotels all over the world, but this is the perfect example for a game that would have been above average two years ago, but cannot compete at all with current time management titles.
Jane is back for Jane’s Hotel Mania, the third part in this popular time management series. Once again, it’s up to you to serve guests quickly in different hotels all over the world, but this is the perfect example for a game that would have been above average two years ago, but cannot compete at all with current time management titles.
This time around it is not Jane who takes responsibilities for new hotels, but rather her niece Jenny who Jane takes under her wing and introduces to the hotel business. Over the course of the game she will manage four different hotels in Egypt, Scotland, Russia and Monaco. Jane’s Hotel Mania features 40 levels and eight hidden object mini-games, delivery a medium-length game that doesn’t have a whole lot of depth.
Basically the game can be described rather quickly. Guests arrive at your hotel, have to be checked in, demand various services and have to be checked out. While Jenny is responsible for preparing meals, cocktails, and delivering the phone or a newspaper, she is also supported by a maid and a porter, who fulfill the remaining requests. The maid takes care of cleaning rooms, watering flowers, or doing the laundry, while the porter delivers luggage, repairs broken machines, and upgrades rooms. This should clarify the great variety of tasks and that Jane’s Hotel Mania features a hectic pace, which is definitely welcome. That makes it even more disappointing that the game lacks in so many other areas.
Your guests only differ in appearance, which prevents the game of being as deep as games like the recent Cooking Dash, but they do demand different room types. There are single and double rooms, along with luxury and presidential suites. The better a room, the more a guest will pay in the end. If a guest gets his or her preferred room, it will increase their loyalty, and after a specific accumulation of loyalty you are even able to upgrade rooms within a level. Unfortunately this is one of the aspects that isn’t really emphasized enough in the game, which might confuse some players.
In every level it is your goal to earn a certain amount of money, to serve all guests (which means that you can automatically restart a level if you only lose one guest), and to sometimes upgrade a room. Here another issue of Jane’s Hotel Mania comes into play. Some of the expert goals seem impossible to reach, and there is not much you can do about it, which means that the game is often on the borderline of being frustrating. There is no real strategic thinking involved, and apart from avoiding blatant mistake there are no options to improve your score notably.
A hint on what Jane’s Hotel Mania could have been is given by the upgrade and skill system. The vast number of upgrades for each hotel and the large variety of skills that your staff can learn is definitely impressive and would have been a great feature if the whole game had been more coherent and entertaining. Upgrades improve your hotel’s popularity, the patience of guests, or the money you earn for each service, while the skills enable your staff to perform their various tasks quicker.
All in all fans of this franchise might still like Jane’s Hotel Mania. It improves on its predecessors, though not really notably, and is without a doubt challenging and hectic. Other players who are used to the pretty high standards of current time management games will be probably be disappointed though. With a lot more polish and a more coherent gaming experience the game would definitely have gotten a recommendation, but as-is we advise you to try before you buy.
