Two Point Campus Review (Xbox Series X|S)

The excellent Two Point Hospital has offered up countless hours of simulation fun on Xbox Game Pass ever since it joined back in early 2020, and now the developers behind that game are back with Two Point Campus, taking us out of the medical wards and into the halls of various school academies — complete with the signature over-the-top craziness that Two Point Studios has become fondly known for over the past few years.

This time around, the goal of Two Point Campus is to educate your students as effectively as possible in order to complete your objectives and grow your campus. This is achieved by providing better facilities and staff, keeping your students happy and entertained, and expanding your campus over time to adapt to more students. Everything becomes more complex as your campus begins to grow, and it's your job to try and manage it all effectively in order to produce a successful school campus with grades as close to A+ as you can manage.

On paper, it perhaps sounds a little daunting if you haven't played the previous game, but Two Point Campus does a great job of teaching you the ropes. The single-player campaign offers up what is essentially an extensive tutorial — complete with multiple levels of objectives — where you're gently eased into the process of building and maintaining facilities, along with learning to how to produce A+ students. This, combined with the efficient control scheme on Xbox, means you'll find yourself building a busy and thriving campus within one or two hours at most, and the process of getting to that point is consistently enjoyable and never feels too overwhelming.

The wackiness of Two Point Hospital is also back with a vengeance here, featuring crazy lessons centred around everything from Knight School to Money Wangling, along with students that can take the form of goths and even clowns! Like last time, Two Point Campus is a game that doesn't take itself too seriously, yet it still packs a significant amount of depth for those who crave a strategic experience. If you just want to watch the madness unfold without caring too much about the strategy side though, there are definitely ways to do that.

There's also a handy Sandbox mode in which you can pick the campus of your choice and choose from a variety of options to either increase the difficulty or make it as easy as possible, which helps to add more longevity beyond the campaign (if you recall, the mode was also added to Two Point Hospital as a post-launch update).The only downside with this is that it's locked until you get past the fourth campaign level, which makes sense as the campaign teaches you how to play, but it still seems a little unnecessary to block access to it entirely. What if we just want to mess around with near-unlimited money and possibilities from the start? Let us go crazy!

We'll also point out that the game's audio, which takes the form of a campus radio with jazzy tunes and a variety of familiar quips from the hosts, actually begins to grate pretty quickly in our opinion... but you probably won't feel the same way if you liked the audio in Two Point Hospital as it's very similar for the most part. We've just gotten to the point where we're listening to Spotify while we play instead, and Two Point Campus is the perfect game for that anyway.

We could pick out a couple more negatives, like the slightly confusing difficulty of keeping students entertained sometimes (an easy way is to just place Crazy Taxi arcade machines everywhere!), but we're just nit-picking — the important takeaway is that Two Point Campus is really, really good. It's the sort of game that you'll start playing on a whim in the evening, and before you know it, it'll be midnight. It does an excellent job of getting you invested, and while we admittedly haven't put that much time into Two Point Hospital over the years, we haven't found ourselves getting bored too quickly with Campus even though it's essentially a 're-skin' of an old formula. In fact, it's just made us want to go back and play Two Point Hospital all over again!