Two Point Campus Is A Chill Sim For All

Image: Two Point Studios

The college management sim Two Point Campus, which was just released on just about every gaming platform and Xbox Game Pass, is the sequel to 2018’s Two Point Hospital. Both games use an identical art style, similar user interface and contain the same mixture of goofy and weird gags and jokes. But whereas Hospital was aimed at stressing you over choices, Campus is colder in the way it lets you take care of the students who come to your schools. The change is working, but the game still has some UI issues and performance issues to fix.

Two Point Hospital could get surprisingly intense. While the world is colorful, silly, and filled with illnesses and weird jokes, balancing patient needs, staff demands, profits, and more during more intense times is no fun at all. It’s hectic and exciting. However, it was also a game made for PC and intended to be a spiritual successor to Bullfrog’s beloved classic Theme Hospital. While I loved Two Point Hospital, others were put off by how intense things were, as well as the menus and PC UI. It was a great game, but designed for a certain type of person.

Two Point Studios built Two Point Campus from the ground up to be a different kind of management sim, away from story demands and with console gamers in mind. This leads to a different type of game. Two Point Campus is not here to stress you out. Instead, it offers a more relaxed and personal management sim where you care more about the physical, social, mental, and emotional needs of your students than say balancing the books or making sure no one dies. The stakes here are certainly lower than when running an emergency room, and with breaks between school years, Campus will feel calmer and more inviting to people who might not have grown up in playing old PC simulations.

Two Point Studios

Some might be disappointed with the slower pace, but I really enjoyed the change. It’s a game where you can (and will) spend a lot of time playing with things. Moving objects, remodeling classrooms, building lecture halls, adding dorm decorations, and tinkering with layouts and hallways are all up to you. And compared to the previous game, all of this is now much easier to do on a controller.

In my experience with the early levels of the game, the money isn’t too hard to come by if you’re careful early on not to get into debt by building everything possible at once. So instead of worrying about profits, Campus quickly becomes a game where you spend a lot of time making sure your students are as comfortable, healthy, and smart as possible.

It’s quite a contrast to Two Point Hospital, where your patients were just walking around with piggy banks and you never really stopped thinking of them as people. In Campus, students feel more like real humans, and because they stay a few years away from graduation, you’ll start to develop a greater connection with many of them.

Your end goal is to help all of your wacky students graduate. Screenshot: Two Point Studios/Kotaku

When my college grades started to drop, I felt more invested in improving college facilities to make sure all my young students could get back to higher grades. And when the kids felt lonely, I made sure to listen to their individual needs and help them meet other students, so they could develop new friendships and romantic relationships.

It all culminates when they finally graduate. I felt a strange sense of pride watching them all walk to the nearby bus stop, diploma in hand. Well, I also felt a pang of fear seeing a ton of tuition disappear as well.

Alright, so yeah, it’s still a management sim, and while the stakes are lower and the general Campus vibe is cooler, you’ll still need to keep an eye on your money if you want to build the three biggest and most amazing. – star schools in the county. And because I cared more about my students, it was harder for me to save money or hold back on things they all wanted, like more bathrooms or working showers. I mean, I still didn’t give them what they wanted all the time, and I tended to cram them into tiny dorms. But I felt bad about it, I swear!

Unfortunately, I also felt bad while playing on PC, as I encountered performance issues and UI issues. None of them made the game unplayable, mind you, but still worth mentioning.

Planning your campus becomes an exercise in managing space and function. Screenshot: Two Point Studios/Kotaku

With a controller, the UI feels good, but the mouse and keyboard suffer from a few quirks that I think can be fixed in a patch. Right now they are causing some inconvenience. More than once I’ve ended up selling an entire piece by accident or misclicked on the wrong item. And when my campus got too big, I noticed a slowdown, something I had never noticed in Two Point Hospital or other similar games I’ve played on this same very fast computer.

Hopefully all of this can be fixed in the future. Considering the support Two Point Hospital received after launch, with tons of updates and DLC packs, I expect Campus to only get better over the next few months and years.

Two Point Campus is a worthy sequel to Hospital. While some may find the less hectic, high-stakes nature of Campus a downside, I enjoyed the change of pace. I can always play hospital if I want to save lives. Instead, Campus allowed me to connect with students and a school in a way that I really enjoyed, which also made it harder to squeeze the kids for every penny they had. I did it anyway, but I didn’t like it. Okay, I liked it, but I never giggled about it. Not much at least.