Two Point Campus is a chill sim for everyone

College management sim Two point campuswhich just hit pretty much every gaming platform and Xbox Game Pass is the sequel to 2018 Two point hospital. Both games use an identical art style, a similar interface, and contain the same mix of wacky, weird gags and jokes. But during hospital it was just about stressing you out with decisions campus is more relaxed in the way you can take care of the students that come to your schools. The change is working, but the game still has some UI issues and performance issues that need to be ironed out.

Two point hospital could be surprisingly intense. While the world is colorful, silly, and full of weird illnesses and jokes, balancing patient needs, staffing requirements, profits, and more in more intense moments isn’t funny at all. It’s hectic and exciting. However, it was also a game developed for the PC, intended as a spiritual successor to the popular Bullfrog classic theme hospital. While I loved Two point hospital, others were put off by how intense things could get, as well as the PC menus and user interface. It was a great game, but made for a certain type of person.

Two Point Studios built Two point campus from the ground up as a different kind of management sim, removed from the demands of the story and with console players in mind. This leads to a different kind 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 your students’ physical, social, mental, and emotional needs than to say you balance the books or make sure no one dies. The stakes here are certainly less than running an emergency room, and with breaks between school years, campus will feel calmer and more welcoming to people who may not have grown up with the old PC sims.

Some might be disappointed with the slower pace, but I really enjoyed the variety. This is a game where you can (and will) spend a lot of time messing around with things. Moving objects, rearranging classrooms, building lecture halls, adding decorations to dorm rooms, and tinkering with floor plans and corridors is your job. And compared to the previous game, it’s all much easier to do on a controller now.

In my experience with the first few levels of the game, money isn’t too hard to come by if you take care early on not to go into debt by building all sorts of things 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 piggy banks and you never really stopped thinking about them as people. in the campusstudents feel more like real people, and because they’re staying here for a few years before graduation, you’ll start to bond more closely with many of them.

As my institution’s grades began to decline, I felt more invested in improving the college’s facilities to ensure that all of my young charges could achieve higher grades again. And when the children were feeling lonely, I listened to their individual needs and helped them meet other students so they could form new friendships and romantic relationships.

It all culminates when they finally graduate. I felt a strange sense of pride as I watched them all march towards the nearby bus stop, diplomas in hand. Well, I also had a pang of fear when I saw a lot of tuition disappear as well.

Okay, so yes, this is still a management sim, and while the stakes are lower and the overall vibe of campus is more relaxed, you still need to watch your money if you want to build the biggest and most amazing three star schools in the county. And because I cared more about my students, it was harder for me to cut corners or hold back on things everyone wanted, like more bathrooms or working showers. I mean, I still didn’t always give them what they wanted and had a tendency to stuff them into tiny dormitories. But I felt bad about it, I swear!

Unfortunately, playing it on PC also made me feel bad as I encountered some performance issues and UI issues. None of them made the game unplayable, mind you, but worth mentioning nonetheless.

The UI feels good with a controller, but the mouse and keyboard suffer from a few quirks that I think can be fixed in a patch. They’re causing trouble at the moment. More than once I’ve accidentally sold an entire room or mis-clicked on the wrong item. And as my campus got too big, I noticed a slowdown, something I’d never noticed Two point hospital or other similar games I played on the same very fast computer.

Hopefully this can all be fixed in the future. Considering the amount of support Two point hospital was released after launch, with tons of updates and DLC packs I expect campus to only get better in the coming months and years.

Two point campus is a worthy sequel hospital. While some can find campus‘ Less rush and high stakes nature a downside, I enjoyed the variety. I can always play hospital if I want to save life. Instead of this, campus allowed me to connect with students and a school in a way that I really valued, which also later made it that much harder to squeeze the kids for every penny they had. I did it anyway, but I didn’t enjoy it. Okay, I enjoyed it, but I never cackled about it. At least not very much.