Official Score
Overall - 95%
95%
To keep it simple, Two Point Campus delivers. It's everything fans of Two Point Studio's would expect. An expertly crafted management simulation experience with the perfect amount of humor, wonderfully designed characters, a game full of heart from start to finish.
Following on from the hugely successful Two Point Hospital, Two Point Studios once again wants to take the management sim world by storm with the release of Two Point Campus. Promising the same witty humor and charming graphics, Two Point Campus is a near guarantee for success, but does the repetitious formula grow stale?
Two Point Campus Review
I remember my earlier days diving into Two Point Hospital. The perfect blend of old-school management sims with modernized graphics and construction tools, it trumped a game I thought would never be trumped: Theme Hospital. Taking clear inspiration from the best games of yesteryear worked a charm the first time around, but I was concerned Two Point Campus wouldn’t evolve far enough to keep me engaged from start to finish. However, as is often the case, I was completely wrong.
Two Point Campus is exactly what you would expect it to be, never straying from being exactly what it wants to be. It takes the foundations of Two Point Hospital and adds layer after layer of new features and mechanics to deliver an engaging, rewarding, and highly customizable campus management simulation experience that continues to cement Two Point Studios’ future as kings of the genre.
Each level follows a familiar formula, a formula that worked perfectly well for Theme Hospital, Theme Park, and dozens of other management sims from the golden era. As the campus manager, you’re tasked with completing a series of objectives while maintaining the stability of the campus itself. You manage everything from the needs of spoiled students to the heating or cooling of rooms. You choose what courses to offer the students, what facilities they have available, and the events and parties they can attend. It’s the perfect combination of the familiar and the fresh to make it instantly accessible to fans of Two Point Hospital, but new enough to keep it interesting every step of the way.
If I were to choose, I would typically look to play these games on PC. There’s no substitute for the speed and accuracy of the mouse when it comes to playing these games. However, after hearing that Two Point Campus was designed for both consoles and PC from the ground up, I wanted to see how it fared on the PlayStation 5. Honestly, it’s the first time I’ve played a simulation game on console and not felt as though it would have been a thousand times easier on the PC. Well, with a single exception. These annoying little bookworm creatures litter the grounds that, if you can collect, award you with some cash. Imagine trying to shoot the fast-as-hell rats from Theme Hospital using a left thumbstick. Thankfully, they are a minor part of the game and I’m happy to say that Two Point Campus is perfectly viable, and works wonderfully, on consoles.
Two Point Campus takes place across 12 levels (and eventually a Sandbox Mode you can unlock), with each different university offering a variety of challenges you must overcome to progress. If I had any complaints with this formula it would be the difficulty curve. The tutorials are, understandably, easy and fast, but many of the subsequent missions are the same. Not worrying about how aesthetically pleasing your campus is, you can blast through these missions in a few hours but then the latter missions hit, and I restarted more times than I can count. After breezing through the earlier stages too quickly to really invest myself in the campus experience, the challenge was welcomed, if somewhat unexpected.
You only have to spend a few minutes glancing through Steam to get flooded with management and simulation experiences. Everything from cleaning cars to flipping houses, it’s a genre very much enjoying a boom of releases. However, as with Two Point Hospital, the charm, character, and warmth of Two Point Campus are really what sets it apart from the competition.
Whether you’re students are learning Gastronomy, Jousting, Wizardry, or some weird sports game with cheese, the detail of animations, interactions, and just general presentation of the experience are second to none. Taking a break from managing the various aspects of the campus, from ensuring enough food and drink are available to throwing parties to keep spirits high, zooming in on the action to see how the students interact with your creation is as fun as riding the rollercoasters in Theme Park.
While much of Two Point Campus is a flawless execution from developers that clearly know and love their craft, it’s not without some minor problems. I experienced some strange controller drift, only on certain menus, and with multiple controllers. I also had to restart one mission due to a tutorial prompt being frozen on screen. The issues are few and far between, these being the only problems I faced throughout the entire game.
To keep it simple, Two Point Campus delivers. It’s everything fans of Two Point Studios’ works would expect. An expertly crafted management simulation experience with the perfect amount of humor, wonderfully designed characters, and charming graphics, it is a game full of heart from start to finish.
