Two Point Campus – Syndication Server

Two Point Campus review: A management masterpiece

Two Point Campus takes everything Two Point Hospital achieved and betters it for a brilliant management game.

Welcome, settle down class, as today we’re going to be learning about Two Point Campus. If you’re unsure about getting this game, then I’ve one very simple question to ask you. Did you play and enjoy Two Point Hospital? If yes, then you’ll like Two Point Campus, so you’re dismissed. As for the rest of you, we’ve got a lot to cover, so eyes front, throw out that gum, and I can hear you whispering in the back, Darrell.

While the modern indie market never lets any genre truly “die out”, it’s fair to say that management games haven’t been super popular in a long time. There have been good games like Project Highrise that are mechanically sound, but they still lack that inherent charm and unique vibe that made the classics what they are.

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If you’re someone who had to feed their hunger by replaying Dungeon Keeper and Theme Hospital over and over for twenty years, then Two Point Hospital was the shining beacon of hope that put everything right in your world. It did a great job of modernising the genre while retaining the nostalgic experience it was selling itself as. However, four years down the road from that, it’s not enough for Two Point Campus to simply be a throwback – it needs to show that the genre can still innovate.

What better theme to pick for innovation than a college setting, where the minds that will expand the horizons of the future are moulded? Plus, it’s a setting no other management game has ever quite nailed. Much like how Prison Architect hit on a theme that’s never got much attention, Two Point Campus manages to feel like something new purely on the back of being a college game.

While there are many gameplay similarities to Two Point Hospital, this isn’t just a copy/paste job. Yes, you’ll still be building different rooms and hiring staff to work those rooms as you slowly grow, the game has gone to great lengths to reflect the differences in managing a school rather than a hospital.

In a hospital, the goal is getting everyone through the system quickly with the best care possible, but your students in college are going to be sticking around for a few years, so the majority of your focus has to be about sustaining their happiness and quality of life because that will eventually reflect in their final grades.

Splitting the game up into academic years was a great idea. It gives you a proper mental break from everything that’s going on and lets you schedule your plans for expansion around these times. It also encourages you to spend time building up your resources during the year to make your courses much better during the break, for which you will immediately see increased income when you start the next year. If you’ve done it right, of course.

The emphasis on student happiness is also a good choice. Since it’s one of the biggest factors in what grades they get, it heavily rewards you for making your campus a genuinely nice place and having empathy towards your students. What would be inconsequential aesthetics in so many other management games has tangible rewards under this system. In a way, it’s the idealistic sense of how colleges should be run, as improving the students’ lives improves their results, which earns the college more money. Which makes this a good point to start talking about the game’s humour.

Much like Two Point Hospital, there is plenty of cynical satire baked into the game about the corporate side of running schools. Some jokes are nuanced and subtle, most are not. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though. The satire of corporate greed in education isn’t the point of the game, so it doesn’t need to be super deep or cutting, It’s nice as a dusting that helps add that charm the classic management games all had.

What’s very important with these games is their longevity, and how it sustains interest into the later hours. While I enjoyed Two Point Hospital, I only ended up completing about half of the levels because as fun as the game was, it couldn’t hold my interest. On this point, I can say Two Point Campus has massively improved.

Each campus is themed heavily around a specific subject, which immediately injects a big dose of variety into things. One moment you’ll be training up the gourmet chefs of the future, the next you’re running discount Hogwarts with magic everywhere. However, I think the main thing that makes this game so much more engaging is all the little improvements that have been made across the board.

Your objectives are a lot better balanced between waiting for things to happen and having to actively do something. In Hospital, I found myself waiting around for numbers to go up so often, but that barely happened to me in Campus, which is brilliant. Plus, the game gives you so much more to do. You’ll be researching better equipment, upgrading your courses, running events, training your staff, and a whole lot more so you’re never incentivized to just sit back and watch things run.

That said, once the objectives run out, you don’t get any motivation to keep going. You can get three stars in most levels using less than half of the space available, and while some people love to keep growing just for the sake of it, the game gives you zero incentive to do so. It, unfortunately, means there’s very little replay value unless you want to do a challenge run of some description.

If you’re on the fence about Two Point Campus or haven’t quite meshed with management games in the past, then I say go for it. This is the best that the genre has to offer right now. It’s a fulfilling experience that drives you to keep seeing what’s next and complete every objective you can right until the end; plus, there’s room for some cool expansions or DLC down the line. However, there is more to be done in this space, and if there is ever another Two Point game I will be very excited to see how they push the boat out even further.

Thank you for attending this lecture, I’m pleased to say you have all passed Two Point Campus 101 with flying colours. You can print out your online diploma if you draw it up in MS Paint first. You probably shouldn’t put it on your CV though.

Written by Ryan Woodrow on behalf of GLHF.

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Two Point Campus: 10 tips to know before starting

Two Point Campus is the latest college and university simulator, and these are the tips you need before starting.

If you want to manage a successful university or college, you have a lot to learn. It’s not an easy task to undertake, after all, you’ll have to ensure you have the buildings, facilities, and staff in order to educate students, not to mention all of the amenities they require in order to live a healthy, happy life.

If you need the breakdown of everything you need to know before you start playing Two Point Campus, you’re in the right place. In this guide we’ve listed the most important tips you need to know before you get started. Keep our advice in mind and you’ll succeed, guaranteed.

Two Point Campus is an empathy machine – ‘Our aim is to try and make you care’

Two Point Campus is shaping up to be a brilliant management sim, and it’s refreshing to play one with such an appropriate message for our time.

Every voice matters at Two Point Studios, according to creative director Gary Carr. Every person is important. Every idea is valuable. The studio sits at around 50 developers, boasting veterans who have worked there since the days of bedroom coders – and now they’re back there, thanks to COVID – as well as fresh-faced devs who are taking their first steps in the industry.

“In the early days, I was lucky because the teams I used to work with were extrovert characters, but I’ve worked with people who are quite introverted, but really talented,” Carr says.

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According to Carr, you have to really cultivate some personality types to bring out the best in them – to make space so they feel like their voices can be heard.

“It used to bug me in companies I’ve worked at where the more senior you become, the more you decide what gets done and doesn’t,” Carr explains. “It becomes almost a private club of development. I’ve probably been guilty of that in the past, but we learned from our mistakes, and we just want to listen to everybody and let everybody percolate these ideas. These are great people so why would you listen to them? Why wouldn’t you put them at the forefront of ideas and decision-making?”

The next title from the team behind Two Point Hospital is Two Point Campus, a strategy game about managing a series of universities. But it’s also a game that reflects Two Point Studios’ own approach to management. Rather than an illness factory where you farm ailments for profit, Two Point Campus is all about nurturing people and paying attention to their needs.

“Our aim is to try and make you care a bit more,” Carr says. “So we wanted more empathic systems in the game. The students need to be nurtured, they’re going to get lonely, they’re gonna want to make friends. They don’t just want to be educated. They want to learn how to become grown-ups. You get revenue because students pay to stay. And if they leave, you lose that revenue flow. So you have to put them before the money. If you don’t look after them, they’re going to leave.”

One of the first things I encountered in Two Point Campus was a student who looked particularly depressed. His arms were lolling by his side and he was dragging his feet. I clicked him and his statistics showed he was happy as can be. He was just a goth. Place down posters of bats and ornamental sarcophagi in the dorm rooms, and this little guy will be in his element. There are many of these character archetypes in Two Point Campus, but each individual still has their own personality and needs on top of it.

It was a system originally developed for Two Point Hospital, but the patients in that game come in, get treatment, and leave. Here you’re learning about these students over in-game years, allowing the system to come into its own.

“We developed for Hospital, but people just thought it was some random animation playing,” Carr says. “These two people, why are they fighting each other? They’ve got the exact opposite makeup that they just don’t get on. In Campus, we wanted to exploit that more by having people live together for longer. You get to see who can work together, who doesn’t work so well together, which courses conflict with each other, which courses complement.”

You’re also able to actively fight against students’ worst tendencies. Perhaps a student is lazy. Well, you could always have them sign up for a running club. Or, you know, you could embrace their personality and let them join the sleeping club instead.

“You’re with them for three game years, which is around about an hour if you don’t pause the game, so lots of things can happen to them,” Carr says. “What societies, what friends groups they form, how social they become, how to balance the education process. Initially, you want to start quite social with them, you want to train them to go out and meet people, join societies, and form friends groups. In the intermediate year, it’s a battle of getting into the workflow and making sure they’re okay in the grades. But in the final year, it’s about hitting the grades.”

The fact it takes place on campus alone makes this game feel distinct from Two Point Hospital. Not only does the calendar actually matter this time around, but there’s also summer break, which allows you to focus on building new campus grounds, making things prettier, and setting the agenda for the next term. It’s almost a zen-like state where the game is paused without being paused, allowing you to focus on preparing for the students to return. It’s also more customizable than the studio’s previous game, allowing you to expand and reshape the starting buildings as you see fit.

As with Two Point Hospital, it might be a simulation about a real thing, but it’s full of little quirks. Cooking class sees students gather around a giant cooking apparatus, while other classes might focus on mastery of virtual reality. It’s grounded in the mundane, but it’s a caricature of the campus experience.

“I wouldn’t start with something like witchcraft and wizardry, because that’s already kind of supernatural and interesting,” Carr says on the reasoning behind choosing this setting. “We’d rather start with the base subject matter to be quite an ordinary thing, and then pervert it. But in this case, we’re trying to see if people can make more decisions for the students as the main driver, rather than financial decisions.”

Nurture your students and they will stay on campus, earning you money as a byproduct of their happiness. If Prison Architect is a critique of prisons for profit, Two Point Campus is a management lesson about staff retention.

“It’s nice to think people can actually just be nice,” Carr says. “There’s a lot of people playing at it. A lot of people use that as their mantra, but you dig into it, and you think that’s just words, really.”

If that hippy stuff doesn’t appeal to you, you could always make a campus for the privileged elite and lock out the poorer students from higher education. I’d judge you for it, but you could do that.

However you decide to play it, Two Point Campus is shaping up to be a brilliant management sim, and it’s refreshing to play one with such an appropriate message for our time. God knows the world could do with some more empathy.

Two Point Campus has been delayed slightly to August 9 to ensure it runs well on all platforms. It’s planned for release on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PC.

Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.

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