Game News Two Point Campus: the new benchmark for management games? Our opinion in a few minutes!
Published on 06/08/2022 at 15:00
If you’ve ever said to yourself “I can’t take this teacher anymore, if only I might fire him…”, it’s now possible! Build a high-end college campus, where you learn cool tricks like creating a big robot or cooking a huge burger in Two Point Campus, a management game coming to all consoles and PC, and offered on Gamepass. Are you going to crack on August 8? The answer in video!
L’univers de Two Point County
It is the same universe as Two Point Hospital, and we therefore find references that we know. A slightly crazy world, very caricatural, fun to browse, but a real new game. The players feared that it would be “Two Point Hospital but you are building a school”, they can be reassured.
12 scenarios and 17 different formations are proposed, and to fight once morest weariness, all these elements are very different from each other. Spending several hours on each scenario to get all 3 is enjoyable, and the trainings cover very broad things, like learning to become a knight or doing magic, not to mention what happens later in the game. And at worst it There is a very customizable sandbox mode to create a game to your liking.
Cute, with successful animations
Two Point Hospital’s efficient engine is back, and you get a colorful and pretty universe to look at where each scenario offers a very specific atmosphere. Like “here here is Hogwarts, it’s up to you to take care of it”. Excuse me, “Poule-de-lard”, you have the reference. Above all, the game offers a lot of elements with which your students and staff will be able to interact. There are lots of funny animations, you just have to stop in front of a classroom to realize that the students are doing lots of things. Pushing the buttons that are within their reach, taking notes, grabbing a tool and doing anything with it… We’re talking regarding hundreds of interactions.
Pleasant, stress-free construction everywhere
Building that campus is a cakewalk, and that’s not often in management games. Usually it’s rather “Olala we have to build a 4th version of this room, I’m a little lazy”. And what’s more, you have to go fast or do that while pausing, and live in a world where everything is fixed. In Two Point Campus, we have time! The game takes place in two distinct phases, and this is the big novelty. The first is the long holidays, an active break in which people who are already on campus continue to live their lives without learning anything, they just meet their needs. During this time, the player plans the coming year by choosing the training provided and building the necessary infrastructure. By taking your time. You can break everything and redo everything, at will. And you benefit from the power of the creation tools available.
You can thus duplicate a room, save a model to be able to reuse it in other scenarios, move, enlarge, shrink… At will. With the filters in the menus and the customization in a few clicks, it gives a powerful and pleasant tool. Adding a toilet block is done in a few clicks.
And this efficiency extends to the exterior of the buildings. The entire campus is accessible to you, virgin land included. You can buy new land with or without a pre-constructed building, and do whatever you want with it. Maybe just expand your main building to make a huge building. Or make lots of small outbuildings with pretty wooded paths that connect them. A management game that does not pay into the hidden puzzle-game is becoming rare! Understand by this that we never find ourselves in a situation where “oh my, I have to fit this room that is too big into a space that is too small, I have to move everything”. No, if it does not pass, you can enlarge the space and it passes.
Students and private lessons
When your campus is ready, the second phase begins: the school year itself. Your students go to class following a schedule established in advance by the game, and this is an opportunity to check that all is well. This is not the most captivating phase, and we sometimes tend to press the button that speeds up the passage of time. Please note, we are not talking regarding sitting idly by, your students and your staff have needs.
Yes, it’s not easy to study on an empty stomach or a full bladder. Your students are a mix of Sims and RPG characters. Sims because they have need bars to fill in order for them to be happy, and it’s by being happy that they learn and get good grades. RPG characters because learning is done in the form of xp and levels. So if you take the game, you can have fun micro-managing each student who has a bad average to try to understand what is wrong, and maybe help him out. It’s well balanced and since you’re not expected to do great works in this phase, you don’t feel like you’re sacrificing a great cause just for a student.
You will also have to respond to the incessant demands for infrastructure to do their homework, to celebrities who visit the campus, to manage natural disasters, the training of your teams or the management of student parties and clubs… There are still quite a few things to do. We would have liked, to quibble, a little clearer interfaces. They are pretty in their “powerpoint presentation” style, but not very effective.
School has never been so fun
Let’s finish by evoking the special atmosphere of Two Point Campus. Beyond the animations, this universe is an effective parody of the American school system. For example, each student indicates how much his university debt amounts to, whereas it is useless in the game. The references to Two Point Hospital and to the elements which have already been established at the time are numerous. The radio hosts, always present and augmented by new faces, regale us with wacky interventions that can gently make fun of capitalism or sects or the students themselves. And excellent news, they are subtitled if you activate the option! Go please, for the next game, a dubbing in French would be perfect!
CONCLUSION
Two Point Campus is a modernized benchmark of old-school management gaming. Hospital was an excellent remake, here a new theme is explored and it’s a great success. The emerging universe is fascinating, but above all the game is effective. The inherent repetitiveness of the genre is effectively combated by the many scenarios with different objectives and themes. The choice of two phases and advanced construction tools make the biggest jobs easy and fun. We want more !
