Two Point Campus Preview: Eccentric education and business sim returns

Build your dream academic institution in this incredible sequel to the beloved whacky hospital simulator game

Two Point Campus is the follow up to the insane hospital management sim, Two Point Hospital which was released back in 2018.

In Two Point Hospital, patients with strange and often silly illnesses like Cubism, Turtle Head, 8-bitten and many other puns turn into hilarious afflictions that you need to the cures for.

But this wasn’t the NHS, people who come to your hospital to seek equally strange cures have to pay for it, and that money can then be reinvested into research, objects to make the place tidier and more comfortable for patients or more staff, staff training and so on.

Two Point Campus take that gameplay and humour and applies it to university life. It’s a new spin on the business sim game by making you create and run your own university campus but throws all the stuffy seriousness of business management out the window.

With whacky courses, you try and make the best university possible by purchasing the best learning tools as well as social spaces to help your students pass their courses and graduate.

The game is jam-packed with silliness, puns, slapstick humour and funny voice acting that keeps the business aspect of the game from getting too dry or boring.

Developed by UK developer, Two Point Studios which includes Mark Webley, and Gary Carr who previously worked on much loved, classic titles including Theme Hospital, Black & White and Dungeon Keeper, great strategy and sim games with a strong comedic element to them.

In Two Point Campus, you’ll need to design, maintain and manage your own institution for higher learning. This includes building the required classrooms and making sure they are properly equipped.

You’ll also need to include facilities, keep students happy and entertained as well as training and looking after staff among many other tasks you’ll need to balance.

At first glance, Campus might seem like a reskinned version of Two Point Hospital, but very quickly you learn there are several new layers of added depth to the formula as well as its own unique gameplay and challenges.

With a Hospital your patients are transient, coming to your hospital to be diagnosed and then cured and sent home, but in Campus, the students live on-site, so you’ll need to provide a lot more for them.

So you’ll need to equip them with not only their courses but dormitories, shower rooms, toilets and places to pick up food as well as social spaces for them to meet and interact and build friendships and maybe even fall in love.

You’ll also need to create your curriculum and select the courses your students can enrol in.

Of course in typical Two Point fashion, they are completely bonkers and provide you with some strange and entertaining recruits like robotics students walking around ‘doing the robot’ and Knight school applicants walking every in a full suit of armour while Wizardy students bumble around like Harry Potter extras.

Some of the strange qualifications your students will be aiming for will be in the much-lauded professions of Scientography, Wizardry Virtual Normality, as well as Spy School to detect secrets or Knight where the noblest of your students shall heed the call and take up the sword.

The metric for success in Two Point Campusis not only how many students pass your courses but what grades they graduate with.

This can be improved in a multitude of ways, from just improving the overall look of your campus, to providing every academic tool and resource they could need and catering to their social needs.

Unique to Campus is the ability to add decorative items, place pathways and areas for your students to congregate outside your main buildings, including things like coffee stands and even some classrooms that need to be built outside like the Knight School.

The design of your university can be pretty granular, but it’s very intuitive and satisfying, meaning you can spend hours trying to get the optimum placement of your ‘Cheezy Gubbins’ vending machine.

The hilarious tannoy reception gags have made a welcome return along with some of the radio station presenters, idents and strange adverts.

Much like the Two Point hospital, your levels have an up to 3-star rating with specific objectives you need to reach to receive to unlock the next level. However, you can stay on your current level and work on improving it to achieve a higher star rating.

Each level follows a theme of the course that area is trying to highlight like level 3’s Noblestead emphasis on Knight School and Level 4, Spiffinmoore’s focus on Wizardry.

It’s a fun blend of silly cartoonish, light-hearted humour smashed together with an intricately detailed management sim that slowly turns up the pressure by adding new elements to learn and things to manage… with puns. Lots of puns.

Two Point Campus so far seems to be a worthwhile successor to Two Point Hospital with a vast array of improvements and added complexity that’s still incredibly fun but still very engaging and will leave you University challenged while still being very, very silly.

Don’t ever change Two Point!

Two Point Campus will be released on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch on 9 August.