Two Point Campus, the latest game developed by Two Point Studios, lets players create a college campus full of charming curriculums and students to match. Last week, I got extensive hands-on time with it.
Two Point Campus feels like a follow-up to the team’s first game, Two Point Hospital, in almost every way. The suite of creator tools feels more robust, the level of interaction with the students, and of course, the actual simulation parts.
Two Point Campus Puts Its Students Front and Center | Preview
Each level I played centered around a different theme. Most notably, the new level the team was showing off was the knight school. Here, I was tasked with creating a campus focused on training students to become knights. I placed jousting arenas, battlegrounds for them to sharpen their skills, and even a giant dragon tower.
Of course, it’s still college, so making sure your campus has plenty of extracurriculars is key to a happy student body. You’ll need to manage requests from students and weigh the pros and cons of each decision. Is it in the budget to start planting giant fountains to beautify the school or does it make more sense to startup the power walking club?
These decisions don’t have harsh ramifications or penalties if you choose wrong, mainly because there is no wrong. While Two Point Campus puts a lot of choice in the player’s hands, it’s not focused on penalizing the player.
The team has put in a lot of work to make this game approachable, even as your campus grows and you need to start spinning a lot of plates.
After you complete your first year in each of the various levels, you’ll be able to incorporate the older level’s courses into your plans for the upcoming year. This introduces interesting mixes of different students around campus.
For instance, I added a cooking course to the knight school and had a mix of chefs and knights walking around. As I began to expand over multiple years, I had to purchase plots of land all around the area.
When you buy land, you can choose to have a building pre-built for you, or you can purchase it empty and design the layout of your new building yourself. This gives a nice layer of customization to really make this campus your own.
While I didn’t have any romances in my preview, the team talked a bit about how the students will find romance on campus and can have varying degrees from friendships to love. I asked Design director Ben Huskins how that system works.
“Yeah, that’s, that’s… There’s a little bit of secret sauce in there behind the scenes, but we, you know, that it’s open to all sorts of different types of relationships. And, you know, that was important for us to have that side of the game and have both the friendships that develop and the romantic relationships. But yeah, so there’s a little bit under the hoods going on there.”
Romances aren’t locked behind gender, it’s the different traits and personalities of the students that determine how they will interact with each other.
The students themselves are full of character and provide a level of charm. They will animate very expressively at objects and classes around the campus. Each also has a variety of traits that make them suited for certain activities and classes. The same goes for your staff.
The biggest takeaway was the names. A large array of different ridiculous names make for some really good laughs. For instance, I had a student – Vladimir Vape – who became a favorite of mine. I took interest in Vladamir and did everything in my power to see him graduate. Huskins talked a little bit about how the naming system came to be in Two Point Campus.
“Yeah, the naming system in the game is a bit of a labor of love,” he said. “We spent a lot of time on Two Point Hospital, just coming up with this big database of first names and silly surnames and just filtering it down based on what we thought was funny and then getting occasionally weird combinations that we like.”
Caring for the students in Two Point Campus is much different from Two Point Hospital. This was a big part of the inspiration when designing Campus. You spend much more time with them over four years than you did with any of the patients in Two Point Hospital. Senior Producer Jo Koehler mentioned,
“Caring for students is really important to us as like, guys designing this game. In hospital, we have a little bit of it, but there is only so much you can care for patients when they’re, you know, in and out.”
It’s clear the team is putting a lot of effort into building on what makes a college campus different from anything they have done before. From the student’s personalities to the types of buildings and courses you can offer. I’m excited to see the full game when it releases on August 9, 2022, for PlayStation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Nintendo Switch.
Published: May 27, 2022 11:47 am