Two Point Campus Preview – Making fun of higher education

Having spent the last few years in hospitals across Two Point County, it’s time to hand in your stethoscope and thermometer, put on your tweed jacket and go back to university. The academic year is just about to get started in Two Point Campus – well, OK, it’s now been delayed until August – and you’ve got a whole university to set up and manage to academic success.

If you were to compare screenshots of Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus, you might be forgiven for thinking that this was a fairly straightforward change of set dressing for the management game. That couldn’t be further from the truth, as Two Point Studios has ensured that there are some pretty deep differences between the two games once you look past the similarly chunky graphical facade.

Of course, some things never change and as you would expect from a Two Point Hospital follow up (which was in turn a successor to Theme Hospital), Two Point Campus is chock full of puns and daft jokes. The tannoy lady returns to regularly interject with dry witticisms, the campus radio hosts love a bit of banter, and then there’s the array of courses that prospective students can take on.

The first university you build in the game gives you two to get started with – Scientography and Virtual Normality – before the second adds Gastronomy to the mix. We also know of Archaeology, Knight School (with jousting!), Robotics and more. The thing is that while some of these might sound pretty normal, their depictions are anything but. Scientography rooms have a huge central whizz-bang machine featuring a bit robotic hammer arm, a ray gun, a chemical dish and more, and the students just amble about doing science-ish things like mixing test tubes. It’s the same for all the others in the game, and while it’s maybe not quite as daft as the various ailments from Two Point Hospital – lightheadedness remains one of my favourites – it’s still a joy to set up a new course and then get to watch what it entails and the students interacting with them.

Where the running of a hospital saw a never-ending stream of patients to treat, universities and education are much more stop-start in their nature. One of the biggest changes for Two Point Campus is that you have a chance to stop after an academic year, take stock of how your university has worked over the past year, and make adjustments before an influx of new and returning students floods your campus, improve the courses by spending Course Points. You can still build new rooms, update the furniture and items, and fulfil requests and incidental missions on the fly, but it’s great to be able to stop and think, and perhaps plan for the year ahead.

Building your campus has a lot of freedom to it. The levels we saw start with a preset building and maybe a room or two, but you can lay everything out how you see fit from there, or tear it all down and start again. Building a room is as easy as possible, dragging to meet a particular room type’s minimum requirements, and the game then automatically switching to give you a door and the core items that you need to place for a functioning room. You can then customise it with whatever additional furniture you want, slap posters on walls, add windows, change the wallpaper and more – you will need to unlock a lot of this stuff through play. Better yet, it’s now even easier to drag and drop a room to a different part of the building, or simply copy a room you’re happy with and paste it somewhere, which is ideal when you want to make a handful of private tuition rooms in quick succession.

That’s all familiar from Two Point Hospital, but now the buildings themselves can be modified, and the space outside put to use for rest and relaxation – there’s a funky-looking game that’s been shown in trailers that looks somewhere between Quidditch and frisbee golf. You’re effectively given plots of land and can do with them what you want. Or, perhaps more accurately, what your students want…

You see, it’s the student body and keeping them happy and satisfied with what you offer that at the main path to success in Two Point Campus. Happy students that are well-rested, well-fed, have places to study, can make friends, go and party, and generally chill out between lectures are going to deliver better grades and be happier to pay the tuition fees that keep your campus running. You’ll need to ensure that you’re providing enough accommodation for getting some shuteye, common areas for eating and relaxing, found a student union, oh, and make sure there are showers so they’re not all stinky and gross.

If you want, you can cram all of this together so that dorms are sandwiched between a lecture room and Student Union, with the loo just opposite and some vending machines, but you could also break them up into a separate building in the name of a little more realism. Certainly, when I felt that the Student Union I build was looking a little bit cramped, I went and built a dedicated building for boozing and partying.

An active social life is key for students, and you can stick your nose in by organising events. It could be a party in the SU, a film screening in the main theatre, gigs, clubs, study-specific competitions and more. These are then slotted into the academic year, which you can track at the bottom of the screen. This shows at a glance when classes will be in session, and when there’s downtime that you could fill with events. The game’s view of time is rather abstract, with no semblance of a day-night cycle, and students and staff simply seeking to satisfy their wants and needs as and when they occur. That party in the SU? Yeah, it’s a rave that for half a month!

From this early hands-on, Two Point Campus is shaping up really nicely. It’s got all the humour and style of Two Point Hospital, but nudges its management in a new direction, revamps the UI, and puts more freedom and control in the hands of the player. I can’t wait to play more, it’s just a shame that I’ll have to…

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• Source: https://www.thesixthaxis.com/2022/04/06/two-point-campus-preview-hospital-sequel/