Hands on with Two Point Campus - Preview
A few months ago, I was given the chance to go hands on with Two Point Campus and back then, I said that the game was akin to trying to manage a bunch of spinning plates all at once, fun but challenging. Sega recently invited me to check out more of the game and I can safely say that that metaphor needs upgrading, because there is so much more to handle.
When I first played the game, the first level was very tutorial focused, while the second welcomed some more changes, giving players a chance to test out balancing more parts of school management. By the time the third school was open for my managerial method, things were far more demanding than you might expect, there was still a lot of students to manage, teachers and other staff to keep happy, but now there were invasions of other schools and even natural disasters to contend with. The first of the two new school was a Knight School, a play on the term night school, but in this one it is all about learning the chivalric code and becoming a knight of the realm. In addition to people dressing up like Knights around campus, there is more emphasis put on exploring the outside, because there are parts of the curriculum that require outdoor space to use.
Requiring both the use of outside and in, might seem fairly simple, but there is a lot more to consider, with the big aspect being that you can no longer just expand the school building, because the outside space needs to be considered. This was perhaps the one area that I struggled with at first, because I had just spent time controlling two schools, where if I needed more interior space, I could just cannibalise the grounds for more building space. I ended up restarting the school, because I expanded the school out and filled it with student facilities and then when the second year started, I had no space to placed the required course facilities and sadly my cash flow was far to narrow, to purchase the land next to my school, thus the restart.
The other big change for this new school was that of invading students from other schools nearby, which fit in with the knight theme, but also that whole American school rivalry stuff. This was something that I didn’t really like, not because it was a hassle, but I just didn’t see the reason for it to be included. When you are invaded, you can get a number of miscreants raiding your campus and for the most part, they are just going to run around and cause chaos. Stopping them is easy, as long as you have a janitor with some security training and stopping them is something you will want to do, because if you don’t they will cause damage. The damage can be easily fixed, they don’t start tearing down buildings, but they will mess up bins, toilets and such and any damage you will need repair, which can impact your potential earnings.
That ties nicely into the fourth scenario, which basically takes everything that the first three schools and then throws in a big focus on money management. The lessons that the school focuses on are magic related, so yes, there are some jokes at Hogwarts, but you can still insert more normal courses, if things get a little to magical for you. What the school does though, as I said before, is focus a lot more on the money management side of things, something that past schools didn’t really need you to care about. In the past schools money isn’t something you need to pay attention to, but you can if you want to, but this time around, the budget is something that requires attention. I am very pleased to say that in real life, I am more financially responsible than I proved to be in the game, which is a very good thing. If you are someone who is planning things out more, budgets may not be a thing that you need to focus on, but the game does offer some decent tutorials on how it all works.
I have spent so much time previewing Two Point Campus now, that when the game does finally release, I wont have anything new to experience. That isn’t true, there is a lot more to discover in the game and I really can’t wait to see what else the game is going to throw at me. Interestingly the combination of courses, raids, budgets and general decision making is far more complex than I thought, but it never seemed like it was too much to handle. How all that shakes out in the long run, that will be something to wait and see, I said earlier that playing Two Point Campus was like getting a bunch of plates spinning at once, but now with new elements, the plates are on a bike, while you are chasing after them on a unicycle and I am down for more of that.
