Game Review: Two Point Campus (Xbox Series X)

Following the immense success of Two Point Hospital (the spiritual successor to the beloved game Theme Hospital), everyone wondered what might come next from developer Two Point Studios. Would they make a direct sequel to their hospital sim? Would they create a spiritual successor to Theme Park or would they go off in their own direction?

The answer is the latter, albeit while still borrowing heavily from what made Two Point Hospital so successful.

Two Point Campus tasks the player with building and managing university campuses. Set courses for the year, build rooms for both the students and the staff, set extra-curricular activities and make your university the most popular place to be.

Unlike its predecessor, Two Point Campus moves the focus away from making as much money as possible and puts it into reputation. Your goal is to help them graduate, not empty their pockets. Although, hopefully you can do that along the way too. The happier students are, more applicants will apply the next year. The happier students are, the more that will graduate, bringing in a lot of money as they improve their learning over their time in your university.

Of course, their happiness is in your hands and it’s your job to build a wide array of rooms to ensure they are getting the best experience possible. The basics include lecture halls, dormitories, toilets, showers, student lounges, classrooms and libraries. However, as you progress, research and unlock levels, more rooms and courses become available. Not only that, students will develop their own relationships and start setting personal goals for you to achieve resulting in a very busy campus.

Happy students = more money. More money = expanded campus.

Expansion is key to earning the stars required to complete a level. As more students arrive, their demands become more excessive and suddenly you might find yourself out of room. Just like Two Point Hospital, you can buy set plots of land to give yourself more space to build rooms. However, Two Point Campus has a significant change that makes for a much more enjoyable experience.

You can build the campus halls yourself.

When buying a new plot of land, two options are available. One, to buy it with a pre-set building in place or two, buy the land only. The latter is cheaper but will cost you more in the long-run when you build the halls.

The benefit of buying it empty though means you’re not stuck with the misshapen building the game set you. One where you can only fit in a handful of rooms because of the poor design. Now you can shape it exactly as you wish. Do you build sprawling halls so you can put down a ton of rooms? Or do you preserve some of the green areas around it so you can improve the look of your campus?

Both have their benefits but how you choose to play is often dependant on what courses your students wish to partake in. This is because some require rooms that, at their minimum size, are immensely large, some require being outdoors and others need to be big as students will demand improvements as the level progresses.

Getting the balance of rooms, student needs and the bank balance is initially tricky but once you get the formula down, it’s actually fairly simple. So simple in fact, that Two Point Campus ends up feeling quite easy. Even when it comes to getting all three stars in a level.

Two Point Campus has looked to simplify certain elements that dominated Two Point Hospital. The most obvious being staff and how they are managed. Here, there are three types; teachers, assistants and janitors. Teachers, unsurprisingly, are needed to teach the students and you will be hiring from a pool dictated by your course choices. Assistants are more versatile. Used to run libraries, student unions, kiosks, medical and pastoral rooms. Whereas janitors do all the mucky jobs, while also providing security for the campus (surprisingly, something that ends up being quite necessary).

Hire them, and they will automatically assign themselves to a task. Although you can go more in-depth with this should you choose and assign them to rooms and tasks yourself.

Provided you don’t mess with their pay, give them nice staff rooms to hang out in, deliver timely and regular training, they will never be an issue. The default settings regarding pay ensures you will never have them demanding pay rises or threatening to quit. Unless your university is falling to pieces and you’re heavily in the red.

The lack of forced micro-management is so welcome.

Alongside that simplification, Two Point Campus allows you save defaults of the rooms you build and favourite items you regularly build/include in your campus. Small things, but things that make the whole experience so much more enjoyable.

Does it make the game too easy? That’s up for debate but the Two Point series is all about having fun. It’s about accessibility for all, with enough depth to keep business management fans busy for some time. It will take some work to get three stars in all the levels and once that’s done there is Sandbox mode and its accompanying ‘challenge’ option that will really test your skills.

So, what else does Two Point Campus do well? The charm and humour are here again, and it can be very amusing. In particular, the DJs of Two Point Radio, who have some really funny moments. The music is also top notch. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself humming some of it afterwards.

It looks like Two Point Studios have another hit on their hands as there is no denying Two Point Campus is an excellent follow-up to Two Point Hospital.

However, there are some problems and notable ones too. Firstly, the formula. Once you have it down, things start to get repetitive. While some levels do task you to approach things differently, not enough do and even those ones, don’t really force you to change up your style of campus building.

Secondly, and way more importantly, performance. Two Point Campus has some serious performance issues when things get busy. We’re not just talking about significant frame-rate drops here, we’re talking about crashes. On an Xbox Series X, that is quite surprising.

Is it enough to spoil the experience? Absolutely not. It’s a great game and a worthy follow-up to Two Point Hospital.