Synopsis:
It’s time to spin academia on its head! Got a yearning for learning? Or just keen to build an educational masterpiece? Two Point Campus is a charming, accessible, and deep management sim where you build and control your own university. Manage a range of wild and wonderful courses with that classic Two Point twist.
Get to know your students, explore their personalities, and fulfil their wants and needs. Craft buildings, choose courses, hire the best staff, and build an academic institution to stand the test of time.
Publisher: SEGA
Reviewed on: PC (Intel i7-9750H, RTX 2070, 16GB RAM)
Also available for: PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch
Developer: Two Point Studios
Directors: Gary Carr, Mark Webley
In 2018, Two Point Studios launched Two Point Hospital, a business-management sim that proved a worthy spiritual successor to Theme Hospital. After years of updates and expansions, the studio has turned to tertiary education with Two Point Campus.
If you played Hospital, the premise will feel familiar. You’re hired to manage a series of private universities, earning stars on each campus by completing objectives—graduate a set number of students, hit prestige targets, and tackle bespoke challenges. You’ll juggle budgets, build rooms, stage events, hire and train staff, and (crucially) keep students happy.
It looks and builds like a spinoff of Two Point Hospital, but the tools are vastly expanded. There are many more rooms and items to craft your dream campus, and quality-of-life features like copying rooms and picking up/moving entire rooms make iterating layouts fast—especially when space gets tight.
Each of the 12 universities has its own quirks and history. Piazza Lanatra sits in Two Point County’s fine-dining district and majors in Gastronomy—your students literally study giant cakes and pastries. Noblestead is a knightly institution where students practice swordplay and jousting while staff fend off rival invaders.
Fluffborough is athletics-obsessed, with its signature sport Cheeseball—think cheese frisbees and mouse suits. Spiffinmoore is a magical academy (with a wink to a certain lightning-scarred franchise) where students brew potions and learn defensive arts while an ex-student hurls curses at the campus.
No two levels feel the same, and a one-size-fits-all strategy won’t cut it. Money comes from enrolled students and their happiness, so you’ll handle requests for new items or rooms, increase room prestige, and schedule events to keep morale—and grades—up. Happy students learn better, but with unique traits, wants, and needs per student, you’ll be chasing moving targets (and sometimes they’ll ignore the bathroom no matter how many you place!). Several campuses also feature unique income sources and modifiers to keep you on your toes.
While that sounds like a lot, Two Point Campus introduces systems at a gentle pace, making it easy to pick up. The UI keeps everything a few clicks away. There’s a bit of grind as you build year over year—each academic year is ~20 minutes at normal speed—which won’t be for everyone, but finally hitting three stars on a campus is satisfyingly earned.
It’s not as immediately gag-driven as Hospital (your first Campus course is IT rather than a patient with a lightbulb for a head), but the game is still packed with small jokes—from course concepts and student clubs to the ailments that crop up if needs go unmet. The in-game radio/announcer gags add charm, though they can get repetitive across long academic runs.
Two Point Studios has done it again: a fantastic twist on their last game with the same playful tone, now pointed at education. Given the studio’s strong post-launch support and the sheer potential for new courses and campuses, this is an easy time sink for budding deans.
(Two Point Campus code provided for review)
