After about four years of providing high-tier medical comedy in Two Point Hospital, Two Point Studios is just about ready to release their next big project. This time, fans will be lending their management expertise to Two Point County’s higher education system. In order to ensure that the next generation gets the tools they need to take Two Point County into a brighter future, players will not only have to craft the best campus possible, but they’ll also need to ensure that all of their students have an enjoyable student life. Hardcore Gamer recently had a chance to give campus crafting a try and it’s already feeling pretty good.

For those that played Two Point Hospital, Two Point Campus should feel familiar. It uses much of the same menu system and controls as its predecessor, making the crafting process feel quite intuitive. Other qualities such as the goofy radio hosts, absurd announcements and light music all make a return as well. So, the building portion of the game is already feeling just as good as it did in Two Point Hospital. There is another layer to it now that wasn’t present in the previous game, and it ties directly into what will arguably be the most important distinction between Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus.

In Two Point Hospital, there wasn’t all that much reason to actually care about the patients patronizing one’s hospitals. Sure, the goal is to cure them and get money, but there’s not a whole lot of reason to characters themselves. With Two Point Hospital, the developers wanted to change that. According to Two Point Studios' Creative Director & Founder Gary Carr and Art Director Mark Smart, a big part of the game is nurturing one’s students and making sure their individual needs are met. Students can stay at the school for up to three years, and they won’t want to unless they’re doing well and enjoying their life.

While discussing the game, Smart had this to say: “[With Two Point Campus] we're on that journey towards making you care. […] That is important to us because it's a little people game, and we want you to really cherish your characters that you're nurturing.” Two Point Campus is still a couple months or so away from release, but that desire already felt apparent in the preview build. In addition to the staff roster menu, there’s also a student roster which provides plenty of information on each character. Their courses, their schedules, a bit about their personalities, their wants and even their best friends are all shown to the player. It’s enough that one can start making plans around it when building and/or managing campus courses.

Actually, this “nurturing” aspect of the game adds more to the planning and building portion than one would expect. Rather than purely building for space efficiency and personal aesthetics, one finds themselves taking new things into account. For example, say several students are feeling bored. Okay, well maybe there’s already a student lounge with a foosball table. Obviously that’s not enough, so the gears start turning.

“How many more kinds of entertainment should there be?” “Would it be more fun to have everything in the student lounge, or would it be better to have a sort of entertainment nook near the vending machines?” “Oh! Maybe it would be fun for them to have a darts corner in the dorm!” Lots of these sorts of thoughts start flowing, and, before one even realizes it, quite a few decisions start revolving around student life. According to Mr. Carr, it can actually go further than that.

It seems that players will have opportunities to put on events that align with different students’ interests. For example, say a student wants to join a club. They could be introduced to a music club and might do something like form a band. From there, it can get even more interesting. “So what’s amazing,” said Gary “is when you see do bat balls and then you put on an event and you hire the student band to play. You actually take some pride from that. You’re glad that he kind of got out there, and they’re actually not bad. Lots of people turn up and watch them and you go you almost take some kind of pleasure about the fact that there are lots of people clapping and cheering, and it's gone down really well. So you are in this kind of parental role within the game.”

Just like in Two Point Hospital, though, these schools are still businesses, so one has to take care to ensure that the school itself is running well too. Staff needs to be hired, trained and maintained. The actual grounds need to be kept up. Courses need to be selected, and they must be sized properly. It won’t do to invest a lot of space and resources in a course that few students are interested in, but it might be worth having small scale versions so that a wider range of interests can be catered to. So long as the school isn’t in the red at the end of the month, there’s a lot of freedom here. Only a taste of that freedom was available in the preview build, but it’s easy to see it scale up as the game proceeds.

So, initial impressions of Two Point Campus are good. The systems and humor will be instantly familiar to those who previously enjoyed Two Point Hospital, and the new layer of student care will likely feel like a natural progression of the formula. For those who are just now getting their feet wet in the sim management genre, this will probably be a good place to start. If one focuses less on achieving top ratings and more on just making a good school and watching the students do their thing, there should be good times for most sim players here.

Two Point Campus is due out on August 9 for PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch. For now, newcomers should be sure to check out our review of Two Point Hospital for a in-depth look at the basic gameplay experience.