Two Point Campus (PC) Review.

I grew up playing Bullfrog’s Theme series. You know, Theme Park, Theme Hospital…Back then, they were in direct competition with Maxis and their Sim series, which resulted in boatloads of brilliant games. Anyways, since Bullfrog’s no more, it goes without saying that I’ve (and gamers worldwide) have been going without a good Theme game for years! That was until Two Point Hospital came around. It was a stellar success, which resulted in a sequel…Two Point Campus!

It’s a bit surprising that Two Point Campus isn’t a direct sequel, but that doesn’t matter much since Two Point Hospital isn’t that big on story and lore anyways!

So how’s running a university?

Pretty fun actually!

What is Two Point Campus?

Two Point Campus is a single player management game from Two Point Studios and published by SEGA. It’s available right now on PC and all current consoles.

Our copy was provided by the awesome people at SEGA! Thank you!

For review of the game, we were running a rig off these specs:
– MSI B550M Mortar
– AMD Ryzen 9 5900X with NZXT Kraken X73 RGB Liquid Cooler
– MSI GeForce RTX 3080Ti Suprim X 12GB
– 64GB DDR4 RAM (Teamgroup T-Force Dark Z 16GB x 4 @ 3600MHz)
– Samsung 980 PRO 2TB SSD

Settings were all set to the maximum, at 4K resolution.

A side mention; both our motherboard and GPU were awesomely sponsored by the great folks at MSI. I can honestly say the MSI GeForce RTX 3080Ti Suprim X 12GB is a hell of a GPU and more than worth its asking price. Great performance in games, looks damn cool with its RGB stylings too!

Thanks to MSI and their kind generosity, we’ll be reviewing more PC games now since we have the hardware to deliver a quality review experience.

If you’ve played Two Point Hospital, you’ll be at home with Two Point Campus. The humor is still intact, but this time it’s a bit tamped down. Instead of weird diseases you have to diagnose and cure, now you have to set up and run a campus with themed classes.

You get multiple courses to unlock as you play (including a magical themed course ala Harry Potter) so there’s something for pretty much everybody.

There’s a ton of similarities between Two Point Campus and Two Point Hospital. There’s a logical reason for this, as the two games exist in the same world. That however means a ton of similarities.

The overworld screen is similar. The art style’s the same, and the rooms are all similarly themed. You’ll need to build lecture halls, specialized class rooms and libraries, but you’ll also build familiar rooms like toilets, staff rooms and even a research lab. Only the doctor job is missing (replaced by teachers in this game), the assistants and janitors return for this one too.

Kudos (points you earn to unlock special in-game items) makes a return, and you’ll be using them to mainly fulfill essential requests from students. They’re not compulsory, but giving the students what they want will usually reward you in some fashion, so you might as well do it.

Assets aren’t reused for the most part, (though they do feature returning voices on the radio from Two Point Hospital) so nearly everything is fresh and new.

The gameplay loop is pretty much the same though.

You’ll have to fulfil objectives given to you by the education board to move on to the next campus. Each campus also has its own quirks (the Harry Potter-esque campus has lighting strikes and invading rival wizards for example) so most of the stages are distinct.

Each campus has 3 stars (tiers) to play through. You get a Star when you complete the campus’ required objectives. The first Star you get unlocks the next campus, while the second and third Stars usually give you exclusive unlocks to carryover to new locations.

Your campus progress is saved, so you can get one Star and move on, returning later with more unlocked equipment to tackle the 2 and 3 Star objectives, which are usually much more involved and harder.

Unfortunately, while each campus brings its own courses, there’s really no incentive to add previous classes to new campuses unless you want to. That means while you can add the magic courses to the sports themed campus, there’s really no reward for doing so.

Most of the time, I don’t even bother and just roll with whatever themed course is available on the campus. It’s definitely not like Two Point Hospital in this regard, where every room is important no matter where your hospital is.

The humor’s also a bit lighter this time around.

The themed courses and their respective rooms aren’t really as giggle inducing as the ones in Two Point Hospital. The animations are as good as they were in Two Point Hospital, but I just don’t find the rooms quirky enough. The radio shows are still top notch though and that’s where I found myself getting my laughs. The music is grating though and it’s pretty much the same handful of songs that’s forced upon you over and over again.

Since we have the DLC (Space Academy), we’re also integrating its review into this one from here.

Space Academy’s a space themed DLC, giving you 3 different campus locations to play through. It comes with its own courses, as well as new mechanics (like meteors that can give you cash or make your students sick) but overall, there’s nothing hugely different from the main game.

It’s highly recommended though because the new stages are pretty fun, though the constant asteroid bombardment (especially in the last campus area) does get annoying.

There’s also a bit of a missed opportunity as the game never really leans into the space setting.

There’s a new Captain Kirk-esque character (and a new convention signing event you can do) but I was expecting more. Perhaps comedic takes on Xenomorphs or Star Wars or any other famous space based franchise? Nothing of the sort is in the DLC sadly.

The campuses in Space Academy are also more technically demanding and I noticed lower framerates compared to the base game.

That’s mainly due to some requirements needing a certain number of students to be on campus at once, which means a TON of independent animation and rendering going on. Even a beefy rig will feel the drain and ours certainly did.

The framerate never got to a point where it was unplayable so don’t worry too much, more like a 10 – 20 FPS drop over regular stages, depending on your settings. That’s actually pretty good considering how much more involved the new stages are and the relatively light hardware requirements the game has.

Needless to say, the game’s performance on its base stages are great and I had zero framerate issues in them.

The Bottom Line.

Two Point Campus isn’t a direct sequel to Two Point Hospital, and that’s alright. It’s more of a sidestep, with a similar formula that players from the first game will immediately find familiar.

That familiarity is still a blessing though, as the gameplay is fresh enough to still be fun to play, despite it being fundamentally the same as Two Point Hospital’s.

Unfortunately, the music in the game will grate within the first few hours and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Hopefully Two Point Studios is working on more expansions and a new Two Point Hospital because as fun as Two Point Campus is, I’d rather be back playing Two Point Hospital.

TLDR:

Fun to play and a solid game overall, but just not as good as Two Point Hospital.