The graphics in Jane’s Hotel 2: Family Hero HD get the job done, but they are nothing spectacular. Your adventures will take you from the Canary Islands to England, Japan and then finally, France and each hotel is "themed" to match the location. For instance, there are "island-y" thatched cottages in the Canary Islands, medieval décor in England, luxurious tapestries and statues in France and a somewhat Asian-styled theme in Japan, although Japan was the most unconvincing. The music for each location was pleasant, but ultimately forgettable.

What I did really enjoy were the patrons of the hotel. Some were quite colorful and included a distinguished gentleman, a brightly-dressed woman who looked like an opera signer, an athletic racer, a starlet, and my favorite, a rock star who looks a lot like George Michael in his heyday and who waves his hands in the air when you hand him his room key. Funny. They don’t say much other than variations on "hello" but the minimal vocalizations add a nice touch.

So, the story in Jane's Hotel 2: Family Hero HD goes that Jane gets a call from her Granny, who says that the family chain of hotels across the world is being sold and Jane must buy them up to save the family name. To do this, she takes out a huge loan at each hotel and, to clear the level, you must pay off the loan. To earn money, you have hotel patrons and you must keep them happy and attend to their requests, with the help of the maid and the porter. There is a minimum daily Goal to meet, as well as an Expert Goal. As you check patrons out and do tasks that cost the guests money, like taking their photo, etc., those funds will go into your account to meet your daily Goal and offset your loan payment. There is also a meter that will fill as your clients are happy; this will add to your daily intake in the form of bonus money once you have completed the level.

Your guests will expect a certain level of treatment and, as such, they can be a bit demanding. The maid will be expected to clean the room, change the linens, wash their clothes and water the flowers in the lobby. The porter takes photos, does repairs on equipment that breaks, sells souvenirs, and delivers suitcases to their rooms. Jane mans the front desk, passes out keys to check patrons in and collects their money when they check out. She’ll also deliver the telephone when someone wants to make a call, serve coffee/drinks and newspapers, serve them meals at the dining table and turn lights on when they are sunbathing. It’s a busy life running a hotel!

I found Jane’s Hotel 2: Family Hero HD pretty easy, to be honest. Now, I consider myself somewhat of an expert, when it comes to time management games, so that could factor in, but the simple fact is that I scored the Expert Goal (and typically over that) on nearly every single level. As you progress through the levels and purchase more and more upgrades, which I’ll discuss in detail in Game Mechanics, you’ll gain the ability to serve more clients and make more money. Consequently, the first few levels of any hotel will be pretty slow going and you’ll only make a few hundred each day. As you start making lots more money and serving more guests, things can get pretty crazy. Your fingers will be dancing all over the iPad and, at one point, I was even using fingers from both hands to get to everything at once. Since each guest has a timer on their patience, you have to serve them quickly, or it will go from green to yellow to red. If they go into the red zone, then they slam their door and go back into their room and you don’t get the opportunity for that bonus. Too many of those and you don’t meet your daily Goal.

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.