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Two Point Campus Review: Twos cool, for school

Clown college? You can't eat that.

Theme parks, transit systems, hospitals, cities, ant colonies — video games have a fine tradition of scratching the itch to make things. Micro-managing the placement of buildings, rooms and roads, delivering happiness and misery to little simulated people with a single click, getting bored and letting a monster trample it all into nothing; the dullness of the names management sim or building sim belie the joy these games can bring. Two Point Studios has pedigree in the genre dating back 25 years to when Amigas ruled the Earth (or at least England), and now delivers its follow-up to Stevivor’s 2018 PC Game of the Year Two Point Hospital. Welcome to Two Point Campus.

If you earned your doctorate at Two Point Hospital you will find yourself very familiar with the layout and machinations of Campus. You’ll earn a solid passing grade with a lazy “the old game but a university instead of a hospital”; the Campus UI, structure, style and sense of humour is ripped straight from the earlier iteration. If that doesn’t sound much fun to you then the only reason to keep reading is my ripping wordplay and academic puns, I won’t be changing your mind about the game.

For the freshmen out there, Two Point Campus sees you building a variety of educational institutions, juggling the needs of students to maximise their education while keeping your staff happy and your finances solvent. You’ll be placed into an exotic locale with students to teach, goals to achieve and external nuisances to overcome. A sporty university sees you developing stars to conquer rival colleges in the sport of cheeseball, while a vaguely familiar school of magic is tormented by an unfriendly wizard who hexes your students. At times there will be financial pressures, at others you will be fending off rivals invading your campus or satisfying an impossible to please benefactor who demands graduates achieve A+ results. The core loop remains the same, but your points of focus shift to achieve the specific goals and building a university that maximises academic achievement and building a financial juggernaut require very different approaches.

That core loop is a lot of fun. Laying out your rooms, decorating them, achieving your own aesthetic goals and creating optimal paths for students and staff is addictive and engaging. Whether you wish to create the most efficient education machine the world has seen or simply make something beautiful, utility be damned, the tools Two Point Campus gives you are a pleasure to use. Do you want the thrill of analysing graphs and spreadsheets to determine gaps in efficiency? Campus has got you. Want to quickly know who is cold, dirty or unhappy? That’s a click away. Designing in the Two Point world is inherently fun, and university life mixes with these tools like ping pong balls with red cups.

While it would be bold to call the Two Point interface the Shakespeare of UI, it is at least a Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Navigating, building rooms, placing objects and tracking individuals is as smooth as a Wordsworth sonnet, with powerful visualisations always one click away and few options are more than a menu or two deep. Templates take the pain out of building and decorating common rooms, and you can choose to populate new plots of land with pre-fab structures or design your own, a big deal to those whom maximising the efficient use of space is the most engaging game of all. The refinements in UI from Hospital are subtle, particularly with item placement where I must reduce a designer’s complex predictive alchemy of anticipation, circumstance and situation to a bumbling “it does what I’m thinking it should do”. I hope they take it as the high compliment I intend it to be.

It is a shame that these same algorithms can’t determine the quality of aesthetics; the prestige of a room remains tied to how much stuff you can cram into it. While you can’t just spam gold star awards on every wall to maximise prestige anymore (prestige bonuses scale to nothing after a couple of duplicates in a room) it would be nice for aesthetic decisions to be rewarded rather than just wallpapering each room with one of every poster you’ve managed to unlock. Perhaps my punishment is having to look at a dormitory carpeted in duck rugs and plastered with germ posters and watch students navigate a computer lab with the aesthetics of a box full of spare cables and old hard-drives.

Two Point Campus is a very funny game, as long as you can stomach the intense British-ness of it all. The curriculum taught is hardly of the garden variety; you’ll tutor clowns, musicians, chefs knights, wizards and spies, build robots and dig up ancient artefacts. Everything is a pun or a gag — student names, subjects, item descriptions, you are rarely far from a giggle in Campus. You can lose yourself just watching characters interact and the lessons being taught. Every new course you’ll zoom in and watch the new lecture visualisations that explain the true source of a musicians talent (the hair) or how to disarm a comically large bomb. Right through the end of the single player campaign you are unlocking new courses and content, and while the campus radio station eventually starts to repeat itself and the songs grate, there are legitimate laugh-out-loud moments from the DJs and mock commercials.

While campus life is entertaining, it doesn’t stop the school year becoming a drag. Where Two Point Hospital could keep a consistent pace with revealing new diseases and treatments, progression in Two Point Campus is tied to the school year and thus you’ll front-load a lot of your building and hiring to meet course requirements, then spend the rest of the in-game year in maintenance mode. There’s still things to do; organising research and training, micro-managing staff to ensure they play to their strengths, beautifying the campus and fulfilling student demands, but I spent a lot of time drifting, browsing my phone and half paying attention, waiting for the months to tick over and the next injection of funds, grades or enrollments to arrive. Improving the performance of your students to meet high grade targets is a particularly slow burn of training staff, upgrading equipment, and tiresome micro-management of students using private tuition. Those are not the fun parts of the Campus experience.

Campus life could certainly use an injection of excitement, but where in Hospital the disasters, emergencies and epidemics required serious scrambling to survive, in Campus the disasters are at worst minor inconveniences (most involve cleaning something up, whether that is weeds, meteors or frogs) and invasions are easily repelled. One mission requires you to sniff out an impostor, but even this lacks the drama of its epidemic inspiration from Hospital. Two Point Campus is afraid to let you fail, to put too many challenges in your way. Building and managing a campus will be more than enough for plenty of people, no doubt, but I was hoping for a bit more variety and challenge in the single player experience, for goals that required planning and forethought rather than time investment.

For those that choose to focus on aesthetics over education, Two Point Campus feels you. While grids and rotations allow you to easily build pleasingly symmetric designs, free placement is also provided for those that want to get into incredibly fine detail. The collection of items is enormous, and while most are locked behind Kudosh you’ll easily acquire most of what you want through the single player campaign (pro tip: make sure to collect your career goal awards and their dosh deliveries. Double pro tip: always have Kudosh in reserve to unlock items that students need to complete their assignments). You can give custom names to everything from the lecture theatres to the movie nights that you organise within them, you can rename staff and students and there are a heap of texture and colour variants for indoor and outdoor building. We’re going to see some incredible creations within, I have no doubt.

While I have my qualms, building a university is a worthwhile, entertaining experience. Two Point Campus could do with a bump in challenge and some better pacing, but its core of building and management are great fun. Two Point Campus is funny, engaging and rewarding, a fine example of the management sim. Not quite a high distinction, but certainly a result that makes the fridge door.

8 out of 10

Two Point Campus was reviewed using a promotional code on PC, as provided by the publisher. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.


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About the author

Stuart Gollan

From Amiga to Xbox One, Doom to Destiny, Megazone to Stevivor, I've been gaming through it all and have the (mental) scars to prove it. I love local multiplayer, collecting ridiculous Dreamcast peripherals, and Rocket League.