Ooh. Your mom told you to either go to college or get a job, so you reluctantly signed up for a Media Studies course and spent three years smoking and watching doobies. countdown. Now you have a useless degree, a lingering reputation as the family pothead, and a mountain of college debt to worry about. Thank you so much, Nick Clegg.
We don’t have to go to college to get a degree because we already have a college of life degree backed by four A levels of hard learning. We have smart instincts, and smart people know that college is good for one thing and one thing only: making heaps of money on absurdly high tuition fees through college bums desperately trying to avoid a fair work day. God bless capitalism.
Two Point Campus puts you in control of a university and lets you fulfill all your fantasies of unscrupulously forcing today’s youth into financial crises under the guise of academic advancement while raking in the cheddar cheese. You can also manage a welcoming, friendly, tightly run campus if you want to for some reason. Either is good.
If you’ve played Two Point Hospital from 2018, you should feel right at home here, as there’s a lot of shared DNA between the two titles. Like Two Point Hospital, Campus is a management simulator where you try to create a successful business while dealing with increasingly complex setbacks and narrower margins of error. Here, the company attracts students to your university to study by offering a range of expertly taught subjects and a vibrant student lifestyle for them to enjoy.
Every campus worth its salt needs courses to study, teachers to teach the courses, classrooms for the teachers to teach the courses, and so on and so forth. Staff areas will keep your teachers, janitors and assistants happy as long as you have them full of entertainment and refreshments, while student lounges or unions are the perfect place for your students to unwind after a hard day’s watching Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on Youtube.
These rooms and much, much more can then be customized with paint, artwork, plants of various descriptions, hot weather air conditioners, radiators to fight the cold, lighting, furniture, and rugs to really tie the rooms together. Building and decorating a room couldn’t be much easier, and once you’ve designed one you like, you can save the template, so if you need a different version of that room elsewhere on campus, you can go to copy and paste to your heart’s content.
Each mission in the campaign requires you to take a campus from humble beginnings to scholastic glory with various trials and tribulations encountered along the way. Most missions start with taking over an empty building and designing a classroom and lecture hall and basic facilities such as toilets and showers and dormitories. You have to meet certain criteria to win stars and winning stars will unlock more locations to manage.
The objectives in each mission are simple enough to follow. You may need to take overall student happiness to a certain level, so booking bands to play at the sorority, building lavish dorm rooms, and installing a Crazy Taxi arcade machine in the lounge should put a smile on people’s faces. Other times, you may need to raise a certain amount of money, or ensure that a certain number of students graduate with a high grade.
As you progress through the game, the topics you are allowed to teach get crazier and the challenge escalates accordingly. There’s a wizarding school level where you have to teach the kids all about the dark arts while surviving attacks from evil warlocks and ghostly creatures, and there’s also one where you have to lead a local university to victory in a strange, cheesy -based sport where your students dress up as mice.
It never gets too taxing – even in the late game – and you can finish the entire campaign in about thirty hours. If you ever hit a wall, you can usually brutally force your way to your next star with a little lateral thinking, and it never feels like a campus is truly hopeless no matter how badly you do. It’s a management simulator for people who don’t want to spend four hours setting up a business only to find that profits are collapsing because you made a small mistake in the beginning. You are free to mess around here and just see what happens.
The sense of humor in the game is somewhere between harmless dad jokes and stereotypical British silliness, and that’s absolutely fine. Like Two Point Hospital and the classic Theme Hospital and Theme Park games of yesteryear, the release isn’t exactly funny, but it’s charming and light and perfectly acceptable for people of all ages. It deftly avoids real-world dramas common in university settings, akin to how Two Point Hospital avoided dealing with the various grotesqueries associated with accidents, emergencies, and debilitating illnesses by inventing comic illnesses that patients can suffer.
Two Point Campus won’t push the boundaries of your PS5 graphically, but it doesn’t have to. The art style fits the personality of the game, even if we think the character models look quite hideous. The music is upbeat and the campus radio playing in the background often has hosts making puns and sassy comments and some of these can make you smile as you play. We don’t, however. We don’t have time for jokes when there’s money to be made.
Conclusion
The lack of real stakes means Two Point Campus never gets really gripping, but the easy, light-hearted atmosphere makes for an enjoyable, relaxed build-up. It’s the perfect management sim for newbies or kids or even fans of the genre who just want a palette cleaner in between more challenging titles. It’s the kind of game you play on a Sunday afternoon, still in your pajamas, with one hand because you have a Cornetto in the other. And we totally agree.
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