Two Point Campus is a university management game in the general Sims style of bearing surface resemblence to the modern world, but then also there’s some robots and vampires dropped in anywhere it would make things more interesting. You set up lecture halls, libraries, major-specific rooms like science labs, kitchens, and jousting grounds, and things to keep student needs satisfied like dorms, bathrooms, cafeterias and vending machines, and student lounges that host rock concerts.
When I picked it up I said that I was disappointed that it wasn’t a magic school manager rather than a regular one, but Two Point Campus is almost a magic school manager. You can teach wizard classes and there’s no strong incentive to expand into a wide variety of different classes rather than doubling down on just one or two, so you can, if you like, have every student at your school be a wizardry major and there’s even a campaign mission that encourages this. There’s even two separate wizard-related courses, regular Wizardry and the Dark Arts. It’s still pretty barebones compard to what I would hope for from a full-fledged wizard academy game, but much more than what I expected from a university game.
Two Point Campus also has majors like Funny Business, Archaeology, and Spy School, so in addition to a regular university and Hogwarts, you can also run a clown college, Indiana Jones’ school, and…was there ever a secret agent high school themed YA book series or TV show or something? I feel like that happened at some point, but the closest thing I can think of is Alex Rider, who is a teenage James Bond-style operative but I don’t think he ever went to a special spy school. Anyway, you unlock different majors with points you get from leveling up your campus, which you do by buying things and hiring people and generally playing the game successfully. The amount of points for unlocking majors goes up linearly, but the amount of effort required to get them goes up exponentially, so there’s no hard cap (that I’ve reached, at least) for how many different courses you can offer, but the more you have, the harder it is to get more still. Instead of getting new majors, you can instead upgrade the ones you have, increasing the number of students who attend for that major and maybe also improving their grades or something, I’m really not sure. The cost on improving majors goes up with each level of the major, so you’re encouraged to diversify at least a bit, but only in marathon mega-schools will you ever reach a point where it feels like the game is trying to drag you into a major you don’t want to support.
This is almost exactly the kind of thing I was talking about with Spacebase Startopia, although only almost because there’s still only one kind of university to run mechanically. Some of the majors do have slightly more complex room requirements than others, the simplest ones requiring only a lecture hall while the most complex require multiple different laboratories and are high enough difficulty to tax your mastery of things like libraries and private tutoring rooms, which increase a student’s grade, something which is less necessary on easier courses and more necessary on harder ones. There aren’t really different builds for different kinds of university, though, some of them are just harder than others. Still, you can at least have the appearance of different universities, and the difference in difficulty isn’t nothing.
The game also has a sense of humor that is, in stark contrast to Spacebase Startopia, present. It’s not hilarious or anything, but it’s actually doing the sardonic British wit thing that Kalypso so desperately wishes it could do. Honestly, the broad theme of Two Point Studios so far is that they’re like if Kalypso were actually good at all the things they attempt. They should make Two Point Dungeon just to really rub it in.
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