Two Point Campus

Genre: Management Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Two Point Campus, released in 2022 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, is a Management Simulation that follows in the footsteps of developer Two Point Studios’ previous title, Two Point Hospital. In fact, players who tried that prior game should find this to be an extremely similar experience, so much so that I’m not quite sure what to write here, because I feel like I’ll just be repeating my review of Two Point Hospital.

Two Point Campus has players building and administering a college campus, deciding where to build classrooms, how to set up dorms, what staff to hire, and how to respond to the needs and requests of staff and students alike. As with Two Point Hospital, this comes packaged in a whimsical tongue-in-cheek presentation that clearly isn’t taking itself too seriously, with silly class subjects like Virtual Normality and Knight School.

Yeah, I dunno, maybe this game just caught me at a bad time or something, but I didn’t find its sense of humor quite as delightful as I did Two Point Hospital’s. This game still has a wonderful, polished presentation featuring a similar style of goofy cartoony characters that vaguely resemble the Aardman Animation style of stop-motion animated characters (such as Wallace and Gromit), and it’s still accompanied by some clever satirical voicework for intercom announcements, but perhaps it’s the sense of deja vu that makes all of this feel too familiar to be especially funny to me.

The gameplay, similarly, is also familiar. It’s all well-made and should be sufficient for anyone looking for a Management Simulation, but it doesn’t do anything especially new or exciting. This game also repeats a lot of the errors of Two Point Hospital, too. The menus are extremely unintuitive, seemingly designed for an interface using a cursor or a touchscreen… but this game doesn’t support the use of a touchscreen. I once again find the game unclear about what parts of my hospital school are succeeding or failing, and why. And I found the game’s text to frequently be too small, both for the TV screen and for the Nintendo Switch’s screen in portable mode.

The frustrating thing is, I know that many are applauding Two Point Campus, and generally I love Management Simulations like this, but I just cannot see what others are so enchanted by in this game. It is by no means a bad game, but it feels to me very much like a retread of Two Point Hospital that doesn’t distance itself enough from that game, nor does it fix the problems that game had. Frankly, if you want a good Management Simulation on Nintendo Switch, I would point you to that earlier game over this one.

tl;dr – Two Point Campus is a Management Simulation and a follow-up to Two Point Hospital, but with players managing a whimsical college campus instead of a whimsical medical facility. This is mostly a solid entry in the genre, but it’s poorly-optimized for Nintendo Switch, doesn’t do enough to distance itself from its predecessor, and doesn’t fix the issues its predecessor had. Between the two, I recommend you play Two Point Hospital first, and only if you’re still craving more of the same should you proceed on to Two Point Campus.

Grade: C+

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2022 Game Awards:

Winner:

Most Overrated (87) – I found myself rather surprised this year when only one game got a review score on Metacritic that I felt was far more than it deserved. However, in this case, the score is so absurdly high that I have to wonder what reviewers were thinking. Now, to be clear, Two Point Campus is a decent game. However, this grade makes Two Point Campus one of the top 20 highest-rated games of the year. What? Its review score puts it ahead of Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, Bayonetta 3, and Kirby and the Forgotten Land. All this for a game that I felt just retreads the same ground as its predecessor without fixing its biggest problems. Absurd.

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