I got the chance to play this for a bit and 3 starred the first campus. It has some of the same pros as Two Point Hospital has, it’s colorful, the animations are cute, some of the comments are a bit funny. Since this was the first location it’s hard to judge how much challenge the game provides. From this location I got the sense that as long as you do what makes sense then you will succeed. People need to go to the bathroom - make sure there are enough toilets so there isn’t a long line. Do this for all of their needs.
Since this was the easiest location I don’t know how much smart time management matters and what the repercussions are if a student needs to walk all over the place to fulfill their needs. They probably spend less time in the classroom, which means they would gain less XP. Maybe they don’t graduate on time? A more challenging may may suss some of that out.
I never finished Two Point Hospital, maybe got 2/3rds of the way through? For the most part I had similar feelings, except that had more pressure to handle each patient efficiently because they just kept arriving and if you didn’t have the capacity it could spiral out of control. I’ll be curious to see what everyone here has to say about the game.
Anyone know how I can rename myself to Dean Pelton? It’s using my gamepass name
I completed the next map with 3 stars and I can’t quite come up with the words to pinpoint where I feel it is lacking. It isn’t that it doesn’t provide any challenge. I almost spent my way into financial trouble, but it was easy enough to get out of it by taking a loan. It’s a combination of feeling like I’m being led by the nose on what to do and also not getting enough feedback to improve the efficiencies where I seem to be lacking.
For the second part…my average happiness sometimes gets lower than I want it, so I sort the students based on happiness to see what is wrong. Frequently it’s because they really need to pee or are very tired. I look at the building and there are some available toilets, or beds, or whatever it is that they are unhappy about. I’m wondering why are you waiting so long to take care of your issue? If your happiness gets low it affects your learning. It kind of makes it feel a little arbitrary as to why I’m playing successfully or not.
I feel like Two Point Hospital was a little more clear because it was more obvious when a patient needed to go to a particular room, but I think it too had some moments like this where it wasn’t obvious why they weren’t going where they needed to go.
What are other peoples’ thoughts? Am I missing something or are these complaints valid? I’m tempted to try Two Point Hospital again.
Couple of bugs:
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starting with a controller disabled the mouse cursor. That was confusing until I figured out I could use the controller or unplug it
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private tutoring seems to have some queue issues that locks up students. They will queue up but never go. Then they do nothing but wait and starve/stink. This breaks their needs. Selling the rooms and rebuilding fixed it.
Can’t say I’ve noticed that myself but so far haven’t got far enough to really need to troubleshoot problems beyond hiring/building more stuff.
Sounds like a fairly accurate portrayal of college life.
Yep.
The complete absence of student AI in this game would often be indistinguishable from the real thing.
Ha, maybe :-)
But it doesn’t make for a satisfying management game for me.
I played Two Point Hospital for hundreds of hours and still haven’t completed ALL the expansions. Somewhat recently too. So I booted this up, one of my most anticipated games of the year, and was instantly bored after 10 minutes. I might need more downtime before playing. Someone convince me to get in there and do more! Feels way too much like a reskin.
I don’t have nearly the experience in 2PH that you have. Steam says I have 70 hours, but I’m guessing at least a quarter of that is idling. I tend to walk away with games paused. Anywho, I last played 2PH back in 2018. In my mind, with that one wasn’t quite as obvious what to do next - but maybe it was. I think the nature of not knowing what illness was going to come next, and needing to route the patient to different rooms…it just felt you had to be a bit more flexible.
If you only played 10 minutes you may not have developed a huge opinion as to what one did better than the other, but I’d be interested in your opinion if you have one. I don’t think I’m the one who can persuade you to play this more because I am struggling to continue on the 3rd campus. If feels like I just did something very similar the last two campuses.
Hopefully someone can share their more positive experiences with the game. I can use seeing this from someone else’s perspective. Glad I’ve been playing on Gamepass/
I’ve not played a lot so far but I’m finding the UI could be better. I never had any issues with it for Two Point Hospital but for Campus it feels like it needed a bit more work to make things clearer or more obvious without having to click on so many sub menus.
Like jpinard it does have more of a reskin feel on it but in that regard I think I’m probably being too harsh given how little time I’ve spent with it.
Is there no edge-scrolling with the mouse? I could have sworn there was in TPH, but if it’s available I can’t find a way to enable it.
I may have liked Two Point Hospital more than anyone else. I played for around 100 hours on Steam and around 200 hours on Xbox and 100%-ed it on Xbox earlier this summer. I really, really like the game. The Xbox port, at first, was buggy, but they fixed it. It has probably the best, most intuitive (to me) interface in a strategy game that I’ve seen on a console. The only problem is that when something happens that has a pop-up notification (e.g., a staff member is stuck and needs you to unstick them), there’s no way to go there automatically, and, IIRC, on PC you could right click on the notification to go the location. Anyway, I LOVED Two Point Hospital.
I’ve spent around 7 hours with Two Point Campus on Xbox. Right now, my impression is that it is not nearly as good as its predecessor. I don’t like the interface. I feel like there are more button presses to get to things than there were on TPH. Although I don’t like micromanaging, I appreciate that management is present in a game. TPC could use some more management options. (If they’re present, I haven’t found them.) For example, staff members have qualifications in different areas. However, there’s no way that I can tell to ensure that someone only works in an area where they’re highly qualified. For example, assistants can be librarians, run kiosks, and other things (I’ll avoid the other thing I’m aware of for spoilers). However, there’s no way to say “oh, Chris is a good librarian, I want them to only work in the library.” Information is also hard to find out. You have to go to a submenu to see student happiness, but it’s unclear what’s making them happy or unhappy as a group. Similarly for staff. In TPH, you could massage individual salaries. Here, you can only do it for all staff (maybe all in a group? I’m unsure). It’s just not as refined as TPH.
There is still a lot I enjoy about the game. Editing rooms is easier than it was in TPH. It no longer kicks everyone out when you add more space to a room, for example. I love that the outdoors is now in play. You can finally decorate your grounds. In fact, when you buy plots you have the opportunity to choose with or without premade buildings. It’s apparently also possible to edit buildings, but I haven’t played with that yet. There are now clubs which don’t seem super important and run mostly on their own, but which are just a nice little addition.
Speaking, though, of increasing room size: I found I had to a lot. The items in rooms seem super big. They were large in a few of the treatment rooms in TPH, but that seems to be the default here. There’s no way to get a really effective room with the minimum size or even, sometimes, a room that’s slightly bigger, in my experience so far.
One thing I’m trying to also keep in mind–and I encourage everyone who’s been disappointed to keep in mind–is that new things are introduced over time in this game. TPH was the same way. It may be that these first levels (I’m on school #4) are introductory just as they were in TPH.
However, there are fundamental things about the game structure that I don’t really like. I’ve come to terms with academic years; I understand that logic. However, each of these early colleges has a specific focus or two. You can add subjects as you earn points of some sort. But should you? I don’t know! Is there a benefit to adding a new subject to a college? I don’t know! Students need dorm rooms. The lovely pathfinding has already been mentioned. That was an issue (for me) in TPH as well. “What do you mean someone is hungry and leaving? I have vending machines in every building and a cafe to boot!” It looks similar here. Do students need dorm rooms in each building? Can you be realistic and have a designed dorm building? I don’t know, but I fear it’s the former.
As in TPH suggestions will pop up and you can also find them hidden away in the obtuse UI. But the suggestions need more clarity. (Also an issue in TPH, but something that I would’ve liked to have seen improved.) For example, I’m told that I have lots of tasks for janitors. What tasks? I don’t know exactly. But I have 25 janitors (!), more than my other 2 categories combined. (I also don’t like that there are only 3 staff categories. As someone with a master of library science degree, I’m irked that the same qualifications are needed for selling coffee and running a library. Realistic, I know, but still irksome.)
One of the fundamental problems for me is the difference between student care and patient care. With patients, I knew if I needed another treatment room or another GP office. With students? It will show up as a condition to start the next year or to earn another star maybe, but it’s not integral to the gameplay beyond that. I know these aren’t serious sims by any means, but I’d (as someone who teaches in higher ed) would love an updated version of Trevor Chan’s Virtual-U that’s more gamey and a comedic skin would be fine. But the interesting choices (if I may use that phrase) in an education game–to me–are things like how many sections of Culinary Studies I do I need not how to try to rearrange the classroom. Or do I need a large lecture hall for some courses and smaller classrooms for others? I feel that there are things missing here that would make this a game that has more uniqueness, I guess.
It sounds like I have lots of negative things to say, but I’m still mostly enjoying my time with the game. I don’t think it’s as good as TPH, and I’m unsure how much of that is fundamental to the game design and how much could be fixed with some (significant) tweaks. In a way, I look at this similar to TPH in that it can be a very chill game when you just want to relax for an hour or so rather than something you’d play for 8 hours a day until it’s completed. For what it is, it’s decent; I just wish it were more.
Honestly, though, it will still likely end up on my game of the year list because I’m me and a) don’t play tons of new games and b) tend to gravitate towards simpler strategy titles like this in my decrepitude.
If I think TPH is 10/10, I’d say TPC, right now, is a solid 7/10. It’s average–fun for me, probably not as fun for someone who didn’t like TPH or that style. I think with some attention it could get to an 8/10 for me, but I do think there are some fundamental things with gameplay that just don’t flow right to me, which may be because of my interest in higher ed.
This is frustrating me a lot as well. I keep getting notifications about weeds, so I hire more janitors, drop them outside and they run inside and don’t remove the weeds. Maybe I’m doing something wrong but it’s not very intuative and as stated by myself and many the UI doesn’t help.
If you click on an employee, you can choose which tasks they can / can’t perform.
You can also give in to an individual employee’s salary demands - probably by clicking on the employee but I honestly don’t remember. I did have to search for it for a while, didn’t find it and then stumbled on it later.
I agree with pretty much everything you say. I think I’m at the same point in the game you are (maybe a little earlier because I didn’t do anything at the 4th campus yet). I am someone why typically likes a slow rollout of new features in games - get comfortable with the base set before needing to learn new ones. TPC is really slow (like TPH). I don’t need a long mission where I’m basically doing the same thing I just did, just to learn one feature - like training employees. Just give me an objective in a scenario that covers it and make the rest of the scenario interesting.
I agree they didn’t make that obvious. The only reason I can think of if that a new class brings in more students than upgrading an existing class. But upgrading an existing class makes better use of some of the rooms you have. For the 3 scenarios I completed I always just upgraded a class, except i think there was one goal that instructed me to add a new class. Which leads me to a complain - that the game pretty much has told me what to do the entire time instead of giving me some problem and forcing me to come up with a creative solution.
One other reason I may enjoy the game less than some is that for the most part I don’t care how my campus / hospital / whatever looks in a game like this. If the game lets me throw a bunch of posters on a wall to make the room look pretty enough I’ll do it without a care as to how it actually looks. I have zero artistic creativity. I think a lot of people probably enjoy making something that looks cool, at least to them.
I’m not sure how much more I’ll play. If you come back and say, it really opens up on campus 5 and gets interesting I will probably be motivated to make it there. Not sure what I’ll do without the external motivation. I have a history of sticking with things for too long after I decided I wasn’t having a lot of fun, “just in case it gets better”.
I barely dipped my toe in Two Point Hospital (not for any particular reason, I just never spent a lot of time with it), but I’ve been really been looking forward to trying this one out. 3-starred the first campus last night in, oh, a couple of hours? Hour and a half? I wasn’t really watching the time, but I really enjoyed tinkering and I liked the concept a lot. There is still stuff I need to figure out and will probably check out some guides today (how I just…make a room bigger? I haven’t figured that one out yet, but I’ve only done the first campus. Maybe it’s not available yet?)
By the end of the first campus, I had one building for my dorms, one for science classes (and the library), one for VR labs, and then I tossed a building in some yard space but never really figured out what I needed it for before I 3-starred and moved on.
I had a great time with that first scenario though, and am looking forward to playing more.
Select the room, click on the hammer icon, then click where you want the new space to be.
Oh just like that huh? Easy peasy.
Let me ask you this one. When dropping a room in place originally, is there a way to make it NOT a perfect square/rectangle? Like if I want a L-shape or something, can I do that with the original room placement, or do I have to go back and add on?
Again, just click where you want the space to be. You probably have to draw a rectangle initially, but you can just add stuff arbitrarily to it before you actually build it.