a sequel that almost gets the jury’s congratulations

Goodbye hospital, then, and hello college! The different medical specialties are here replaced by varied university training, and sometimes as crazy as the diseases of the previous game from Two Point Studios. You will thus be able to manage courses in scientography, gastronomy, robotics, chivalry, magic, dark arts, academic exercise, money coring, virtual normality, tricks, Internet history, archeology, music, espionage, school of thought, general culture , and countercultural studies. As you can see, almost ordinary materials rub shoulders with other much more preposterous ones. A direct consequence of this mixture of genres: the students who roam the corridors are colorful and include punks, goths, knights in armor, clowns, sorcerers, sportsmen, musicians or cooks in white hats.

All this beautiful little world benefits from the studio’s typical artistic direction, which is reminiscent of the Wallace and Gromit style plasticine animation films. And since we are talking about animations, it is appropriate to salute all those which populate the game. a whirlwind effect coupled with pixelation comes to censor the entrances and exits of the shower, the janitors spray deodorant and hold their noses when they clean the dormitories, and the slightest installation dedicated to classes or leisure is a pretext for display of detailed and very funny animations. The whole thing may not quite reach the level of absurdity of the illnesses of Theme Hospital and Two Point Hospital, but there is still plenty to do. Pervasive, humor even finds its way into many text descriptions, while radio announcements are generally not lacking in cynicism, for example when they call students “noisy, reckless, dirty, smelly and generally desperate”. Unfortunately, these messages that regularly punctuate the game are not dubbed in French. And when you are immersed in construction and management operations, you sometimes think a little too late to read the subtitles.

A GAME THAT HAS ALL ITS FACULTIES

It must be said that Two Point Campus leaves little respite to the player, who always has something to do. It is obviously important to maximize the level of the students, and therefore to provide them with competent teachers, libraries, lecture halls and rooms for private lessons. But it is also necessary to manage more material contingencies, such as dormitories, vending machines for snacks and drinks, catering outlets, toilets or showers. And beyond hunger, thirst and hygiene, social well-being must also be developed, in particular through the placement in the university of structures capable of strengthening friendships and romantic relationships (bench, baby -football, statue of Cupid…) and rooms conducive to entertainment (students’ union, hostels, clubs…). Over the course of the campaign, which takes us regularly from one campus to another, the parameters to manage and the elements to place become more and more numerous. Very quickly we find ourselves taking out a bank loan (with a simple click, nothing daunting) to hire more qualified staff, placing radiators everywhere to thaw the students, planning various festive events, renaming or changing the dress of certain members of staff, and even to decorate and organize the outdoor spaces. This is one of the major and welcome novelties compared to Two Point Hospital, which left us desperately between four walls. The parks and gardens here are interactive, and not purely decorative. There are therefore always lots of things to monitor, build, improve, manage or even observe. To be convinced, just click on a pupil or student and browse the different tabs detailing their mood, needs, aptitudes, traits, relationships, personality, etc. Undeniably rich, Two Point Campus remains accessible to all thanks in particular to its system of objectives and score. Obtaining a star is enough to move on to the next campus, and beginners can therefore be satisfied with it. But diehards and regulars in games of this type will seek to obtain three stars in each university, which represents a much higher challenge.

ALMOST THE CONGRATULATIONS OF THE JURY

Both types of players will benefit from an interface that is necessarily a little loaded, but relatively clear and intuitive despite everything. Which is almost a tour de force, since the console release requires full controller support, in addition to the keyboard-mouse pair. Two Point Campus also deserves acclaim for being able to simplify even the most repetitive and tedious building steps, thanks to a copy-and-paste function that allows you to clone an entire room in a single university, and a templates function that allows you to save a room and reuse it as it is (or after modification) on another campus. The initial and unavoidable stages of building amphitheaters and other dormitories are pleasantly shortened. The copy made by Two Point Studios is therefore almost perfect, but there are still a few things that bother us. Thus, time management clearly lacks credibility and realism. That time be accelerated in relation to real time is obviously essential. But totally ignoring the concept of day and night seems regrettable to us. The rhythm of life of students in real life (courses during the day, parties or sleep at night) is poorly transcribed, since we observe some of them lying down in their bed for a few seconds while others are in full course. . We also encountered a bug or two, including a false alarm on vegetation elements. On several occasions they found themselves surmounted by an exclamation mark on a red background. Fortunately, moving a single hedge back to exactly where it belongs is enough to solve the problem for all elements. Finally, as we feared, the game does not escape the “Two Point Hospital 1.5” syndrome despite the change of context. It’s a lesser evil, and given the success of its previous game, it’s easy to understand that the studio didn’t want to review its copy too much.