In my lengthy and unproductive profession as an administrator of fake online game companies, I’ve overseen a jail, a number of hospitals, numerous theme parks, and even a few dungeons. However operating a college is totally new territory. Greater schooling might not be probably the most thrilling theme for a administration sim, however Two Level Campus revels in its scholar years with an array of fantastical programs and a wacky sense of humour that make it stand out from different video games of institutional plate-spinning.
Beginning out because the supervisor of a small science faculty, you’re given a seemingly hefty finances and tasked with setting up all of the amenities a college wants. This consists of laying out lecture theatres, hi-tech science labs, dormitories, employees rooms and bathrooms; filling these with applicable (and infrequently costly) tools; and hiring academics, janitors and assistants to run libraries and scholar facilities.
Like Two Level Hospital, the developer’s earlier recreation, Two Level Campus’s presentation is flawless. Constructing and outfitting rooms has a pleasant tactility to it, whereas the Aardman-like visible model is delivered to life with characterful and complicated animations. Watching your scholar physique go about its enterprise, from heating up meals within the scholar lounge microwave to assembling large, toy-like robots within the college robotics lab, is charming. Every bit of apparatus you purchase is thrilling, merely since you need to see what your college students will do with it.
In play, Two Level Campus’s concepts sprawl outwards because it progresses. Its marketing campaign has you managing a series of schools, every establishment extra irreverent than the subsequent. Highlights embody a knight faculty, the place your college students batter training-dummies in full fits of armour, to a legally nonspecific wizard’s academy that teaches spellcasting and potion brewing. The knight faculty is topic to frequent invasions from a rival faculty of chivalry, forcing your janitors to chase them down, armed with water-pistols.
The way in which universities function brings a barely completely different flavour to Campus’s managerial problem. You'll be able to solely run a sure variety of programs a yr, every of which accepts a restricted variety of college students. This implies Two Level Campus is much less about managing bottlenecks than Two Level Hospital, the place sufferers might stagger by the door at any time, and extra about conserving a watchful eye in your finances, avoiding overspending on employees and amenities whereas additionally guaranteeing these amenities are adequate to maintain your college students content material.
Two Level Campus might enhance its illustration of the scholars themselves. They'll turn into mates, be a part of eccentric societies just like the fast-walking membership, and embark on (distinctly PG) relationships. Extra broadly, although, your scholar physique is way too docile. Granting your college students’ requests for brand spanking new facilities will make them happier, however you too can safely ignore them with out them staging a sit-in in one of many lecture halls, or writing a scathing report within the college newspaper. Some further friction between the college and its college students would enhance the expertise each mechanically and thematically.
Two Level Campus isn’t solely toothless: it pokes light enjoyable at college life by a spread of flippantly cynical bulletins about paying tuition charges and task extensions. Primarily, although, it's content material to give attention to the journey of studying and discovery that college is meant to supply, which it achieves in creative, knockabout model. For all the sport’s wry declarations, the one truest to its spirit can also be the best: “College students are reminded to have the time of their lives.”
Two Level Campus is out now; £34.99.
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