Two Point Campus review – You’ve got a lot to learn

Two Point Studios is the hit developer behind the widely popular Two Point Hospital. In this management game, the player is put in charge of a variety of hospitals in their local Two Point County. This game was addictive in its early gameplay, providing the player with challenges that were just easy enough to keep them going through the different levels.

After Two Point Hospital’s release in August 2018, the developer released 12 different DLC, boasting themed items and unique challenges for the hospital. Over the last four years, Two Point Hospital has received continued support and even free items via Twitch Drops. This points to a developer who cares about the game and fans can likely look forward to the same love for their next title.

It seems that Two Point Studios loves Two Point County, their fictional in-game area in desperate need of new facilities and people to run them. Now, Two Point Campus is coming, allowing players to create and run universities back in Two Point County. The player takes on the role of a humble administrator with no experience who will forever change the universities in Two Point County.

The game starts out and functions very similarly to the last Two Point game, with the player taking on the role of a new administrator at a broken-down university. The company doesn’t have much faith in you, but you’re determined to make a functioning school nonetheless. So begins your journey of educating the people of Two Point County.

The game’s tutorial in the first level is pretty easy if you’ve played Two Point Hospital or any other management-style game. The player is tasked with creating the beginning facilities they need to host a class and then the features that students will want, like food, bathrooms, and residence halls. Making sure you have enough of each for your student population is the key to keeping them happy and healthy.

After learning about these rooms and how to take care of more students, the school year begins and the player gets their first interaction with this new mechanic in Two Point Campus. Everything on your campus will run on a schedule during the school year, meaning that classes, parties, and free time will all be heavily structured and noticeable via the bar that pops up at the bottom of the screen.

Players can check the class schedule and any other events by hovering over their section on the calendar bar. As the years’ progress, players will have to add new facilities and more accommodations to support the new classes that will occur for every continuing student. A second-year cooking student won’t want to relearn everything they did in their first year, so you’ll need to accommodate for the new classes.

This mechanic is really interesting and adds some new depth to your management efforts that you can see. When you’re in year three or further at your university, you’ll begin to see the classes and their facilities filled to the brim with students. However, make sure that your other facilities are evolving to meet the student requirements as well, or it doesn’t matter how many classes you have.

When students are unhappy in Two Point Campus, it can mess up your entire university until you’re able to lift their spirits. Students can become unhappy when their needs aren’t met or quality preferences are ignored. For instance, if a student thinks that there aren’t enough club options or the room quality is too low, they’ll begin to lose interest in college and their grades and payment will falter.

When the students’ grades begin to suffer, it can only do harm to your university. While players will get a monthly payment from the school for tuition and rent minus staff payments, they also get a bonus that can make up the better part of their budget. As long as your students are doing well, you’ll have more than enough funding to evolve your school. If students do badly, then your bonus will decrease.

When a student is unhappy, the game does a pretty good job of telling you what they’re upset about, but you have to go looking for it. There are so many submenus in this game that it feels like every little stat is something you have to struggle to find. It also doesn’t help that most of the menus look the exact same, so knowing when you’re in the right one takes some practice.

That being said, you’ll be able to find what’s making a student unhappy just by clicking on them and navigating to the mood section of their info panel. There you’ll see a whole list of different icons with bars indicating the character’s mood next to them. Luckily, hovering over these icons will tell the player what they mean and how they can improve the character’s feeling about it.

That’s something that this game does really well, telling the player what every little icon or message means in the game. It seems that Two Point Campus understands that all the different menus and objectives can be a little overwhelming, as it often provides exact information whenever you hover over the objective or icon that’s confusing you.

The game does get progressively harder and the further you go, the less the game holds your hand. This is fine, but by the third level, it can start to feel overwhelming in a way that isn’t the same fun that Two Point Hospital was. Two Point Campus does a lot of new things that provide new ways to enjoy the game that weren’t possible in the previous entry, but at times it feels much much more challenging.

Our Two Point Campus review was written based on the PC version of the game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website!