In 2018, Two Point Studios released their first game, Two Point Hospital, introducing a new generation of players to the wacky and unconventional world of Two Point County. Now they invite players to return to their clay-court-inspired world to take over leadership duties for several university campuses on Two Point Campus. Like its predecessor, Two Point Campus embraces puns and slapstick humor to make an otherwise stiff institution more endearing.
In my hands-on preview with Two Point Campus, I had the chance to see just a few of the campuses that players would be responsible for in the game. Little did I know at the time how much more expansive Two Point Campus would actually be in its completed state. While I was already impressed by the game’s humor and creative design choices, it turned out to be the challenge and attention to detail that ultimately captivated me.
Two Point Campus: What You Like?
If you are not familiar with playing a management simulator, Two Point Campus can help you. The first few school scenarios that the game throws new players into are relatively tame and serve as effective tutorials where players can understand the basic concepts of the game, such as meeting the needs of their students and establishing a class curriculum. Players will learn the importance of placing vending machines and benches, as well as building dormitories and classrooms during these tutorials. Each scenario rewards a star for completing a series of tasks. The tasks increase in difficulty and completing all challenges for a given scenario will reward the player with a three star ranking. Players must collect the stars to unlock additional college scenarios on the Two Point County map.
Scenarios begin during summer vacation, with the player determining when they are ready to begin the academic year. During the downtime of the preschool year, players can build new campus buildings, landscaping, and make adjustments to the classes offered on their campus. There may also be some requirements for the coming year that the player must meet before starting, such as hiring additional teachers or building classrooms that meet the needs of the courses offered. When your campus is ready, you can start the year.
Housing students, providing (questionable) nutritional snacks, and a path to a degree is just the beginning of managing a campus. Many things can – and do – go sideways in classic Two Point slapstick fashion. Your campus could be awash in frog rain, cursed by a jealous witch who sends meteor showers to make you unhappy, or even the victim of rabid sports fans harassing your hard (or barely) working students and staff right before the big game. However, solving most of the problems you encounter on your campus is as simple as having a sufficient number of well-trained staff.
Management simulators on consoles typically struggle with porting keyboard shortcuts and menu shortcuts to controllers. Even Two Point Studio’s previous game struggled to be controller-friendly for the Xbox release. Thankfully, it seems the studio has learned from its past mistakes, as both the UI and key combinations for Two Point Campus were developed with the intention of being controller-friendly from the start. The game’s menus, while robust, have been compressed and thought out so that each element can be accessed with no more than a few button presses or mouse clicks.
The menus can provide players with valuable data to help them plan their strategy to overcome certain scenarios. For example, some campuses may be too cold and a temperature overlay may be used to verify that radiator placement is sufficient to warm students up. Similarly, an overlay can also be turned on or off to monitor things like student or staff happiness and campus cleanliness. When a student is in danger of failing or dropping out, an alert will appear allowing the player to hone in on that particular troublemaker and deal with it accordingly.
Improved menus and controller bindings aren’t the only upgrades Two Point Campus offers over Two Point Hospital, though. The Two Point Campus development team has put together an all-new facial animation rigging system, bringing extra life to the already comically animated Two Point countians. These new animations add to the vibrancy of the characters, making them feel more believable in this absurd world they are part of.
Two Point Campus: What You Don’t Like?
For all the things Two Point Campus does well, there are still some design choices that feel like missteps from time to time. The earliest levels of the game are incredibly simplified and can feel like they hold back more advanced players, even when it comes to their three-star challenges. Alternatively, the difficulty level outside of those tutorial scenarios is surprisingly sharp, and can be off-putting for someone who is diving into management simulators for the first time.
Two Point Campus uses both a cash currency and an in-game currency called Kudosh. Kudosh is also needed to unlock items related to student classes, such as class-specific bookshelves or learning stations. These items may be necessary for a student to pass a class, but there are no lists of required items for students or indications that they may become necessary items before actually being done. In the case of some items, such as class-specific bookcases, they aren’t even available to unlock until a student needs them. If you spend your limited amount of Kudosh before receiving a warning that these items are needed, you can quickly find yourself in a tricky situation where a large number of students fail, consider quitting or refuse to pay their tuition.
The more a player finds himself struggling, the more popups and warnings begin to flood the player’s screen. One notification can signal that there are five students who are considering quitting, but is then immediately followed by additional notifications for each individual student who has a problem. It can be nice to click on a notification and immediately focus on the problem student so you can try to fix the problem, but when these notifications quickly take over the system tray, they can become overwhelmed and lose track of what problem you are facing. have.’ re specifically trying to take care of.
To add to the chaos and clutter, enabling Two Point Campus’ subtitles puts them right above the system tray. The subtitles have white text with a semi-transparent black background which when layered over the notification text box can result in an absolute mess that makes both elements difficult to read.
Two Point Campus: Should You Buy It?
The management simulator genre can be a tough beast to tackle. Often games in this genre are bloated with menus and overlays along with a myriad of choices that a novice player can quickly overcome. Two Point Campus does a great job of trimming the fat around the menus and options to keep things so simplified that just about anyone can pick it up and try it, while still leaving enough depth to keep hardcore sim fans actively engaged. .
However, the menu layout says nothing if the game itself isn’t fun. This is where Two Point Campus shines brightest. Courses you can offer on campus include humorous puns like gastronomy and funny business, and you can’t help but smile as you watch your students prepare a giant pizza in the kitchen you built to serve as their classroom. There’s something incredibly satisfying about challenging a rival school to a Cheeseball tournament and then seeing your students come alive after a win. Realistically, the idea of running a university campus is something that sounds dull and uninteresting, but through the sheer willpower of humor and quirkiness, Two Point Studios has managed to make it not only a fun but also a funny experience.
Two Point Campus is an Xbox Play Anywhere title and can be accessed seamlessly on both Xbox and PC. While I personally felt the game was better suited to play with a mouse, the controller scheme is adequate, and it’s perfectly reasonable to switch between both platforms. Whether I was on PC or Xbox, the game played flawlessly and never experienced crashes or instability. Two Point Campus launches on Xbox Game Pass, so whether you’re an experienced sim manager or just wanting to dip your toes into the genre for the first time, you can try out Two Point Campus.
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