Having played the demo for this game before its release, I have to say I was very excited to actually manage a school. I absolutely adore these tycoon-management games, and the graphic style + the environment this one was set in did wonders to catch my attention.
Unfortunately, as soon as I played the demo, I found that this game was very much like others of its genre.
So, back when I was a little kid, there was this game me and my sister absolutely loved, called Theme Hospital. How is this relevant to the review, you ask? We will get there shortly. Theme Hospital, apparently, was very good; though I had no idea what a good game was at the time, but I loved Theme Hospital with passion. And, a few years back, I noticed a similar game called "Two Point Hospital" which also approached the hospital-tycoon style with a bit of a funny point of view. The diseases you had to treat were cartoonish, often very crazy-like and that was good. It kept the game new, not realistic, but surprising.
I don't remember much about Theme Hospital, I hardly remember the gameplay, but Two Point Hospital has a very "unique" gameplay. The building aspect of the game is a matter of organization and how much stuff you can fit inside one room. How does that work? Well...
Let's say you want a waiting room for your patients, you will make a box (or any other shape, if you are feeling brave) and add the essentials. The essentials change depending on the room you wanna make, so let's say here the essentials are basically the reception desk and seats. After adding that, you have the option of boosting its attractiveness. So, adding flower pots, water dispensers, posters, and windows will do that. So, what happens is, you have a room, and your room has little stats you can increase, and increasing those boost the productivity of said room - alongside making a few changes here and there.
Now imagine this for every other room. Examination Room, Nursery, Surgery Room, and so on and so forth. You will do this for every room that is not a hallway.
And while this is not bad per se, it gets tedious (to me). The game is basically broken into how much stuff you can fit inside a cubicle, and you can make that cubicle bigger if you want it to be even better (or until you unlock smaller objects that boost your stats even further for less space). On top of that, you will have your employees, who have their own set of stats and traits, which is good too. But in the end, it doesn't affect the game as much as you'd think. It basically affects their performance but nothing else. A trait can be called "lazy" and all it does is affect how fast they perform an action, it doesn't go beyond that. Mind you, this is an example, I don't really remember if there's a trait that does that.
But moving forward, Two Point released yet another game, called Two Point Campus - and look at that, it is quite similar to the game we are reviewing today! Two Point Campus has the same approach (with QoL of course) that its brother. Your objective here is to graduate your students, in a funny little environment with bizarre classes and all that.
Now, Let's School has this same approach to its game. It's a Two-Pointesque game at its core, or a "Facility Based" game. Whatever name you wanna give it, it has the same vibes as the two mentioned games. Though this is not bad, but in the long run it gets quite boring. You will take students from communities, often close or distant from your school, and you will teach them whatever they wanna graduate on - and you have four types of classes. Art, sports, science, and literature. So, in one class you might have students wanting to graduate in Arts and Sports, and in another, you will have some in Science and Literature.
Organization is key here, and so are your teachers, they also have their own set of stats. You will need "teachers" to handle administration, cafeterias, research, and so on. You have homeroom teachers for every class, and as you research new stuff, you unlock modules and actions that will help you in the long run of your school. So, in the end, it is a very simple game. Put good teachers to work, and get good grades, even if your students are bullies, I had no trouble getting them to behave and score A+ on their exams.
I wasn't expecting the game to be hard, mind you, but something I disliked a lot was definitely the Two-Pointesque thing. I don't like having to fill my small room with the same object only to boost my performance; I like to see my room looking good, cute, realistic even! I don't expect every object to be used, but I want them to feel unique to the place they are, and not a copy and paste of every other classroom (even if I tried to differentiate the rooms).
You will get random events happening in your school, however. Students can befriend one another, they can fall in love apparently, they will bully others, they will bring frogs to the classes, play video games and so on. You will be responsible for assigning a teacher to deal with it and... that's it. Their discipline stat will raise (to show they are behaving) and they will get a demerit. With three, you can expel them. But why would you do that? Well... I don't think there's a reason. A student who has been disciplined will keep doing what they want, I ended up having five students who kept gaming around and they had maybe six or so misconducts.
I didn't get far in the seven hours I played, stopping at the third research tree (there are four, as I write this), and while the game is good and I had fun playing it; I feel like there's a lot to improve here.
Unlike the previously mentioned games, I feel like the developers wanna try a bit of everything here, and that is good; I can ignore the district-building-whatever genre if the school feels like an actual school. It is being sold as a finished game (not early access) but the developers have already sent some hotfixes and I feel like the first week will be full of changes. They promised, too, new content and I think once the Workshop hits, a lot will change.
It is not a bad game, mind you, the art style is pretty cute, having to manage your teachers and all that can be relaxing if you are into it, and it is far easier than most management games. It gives you the opportunity to tweak the difficulty, if you so wish, but I think the point of the game is not exactly managing your school.
I will be playing Sandbox in the next few days and maybe I will edit this review with my experience there, but making a cool school seems like a plan, it has a lot of options to customize your institute and overall the general vibe of the game is good. I can see the developers are putting effort and I expect good things from this game in the future, but as it stands I don't feel that it should be called a "finished game".
A gem with rough corners or something. It is a good game, you can definitely spend time on it and it is not extremely expensive. I definitely can recommend it if you wanna handle a school, but don't expect much in regard to the "sim" part. Then again, I did not go far enough into the career mode to see how the rest of the game is affected by new research facilities, but Sandbox will probably answer most if not all of my questions.
I'd say you can fully enjoy this game as it is, just don't expect to invest a hundred hours into it like you can in other management games (Factorio, Rimworld, Crusader Kings 3... maybe?). It is also not fair to compare this one with others, as it is not fully fleshed out just yet.
Excited to see the next updates, so I will probably come back to this game within a few weeks.
Unfortunately, as soon as I played the demo, I found that this game was very much like others of its genre.
So, back when I was a little kid, there was this game me and my sister absolutely loved, called Theme Hospital. How is this relevant to the review, you ask? We will get there shortly. Theme Hospital, apparently, was very good; though I had no idea what a good game was at the time, but I loved Theme Hospital with passion. And, a few years back, I noticed a similar game called "Two Point Hospital" which also approached the hospital-tycoon style with a bit of a funny point of view. The diseases you had to treat were cartoonish, often very crazy-like and that was good. It kept the game new, not realistic, but surprising.
I don't remember much about Theme Hospital, I hardly remember the gameplay, but Two Point Hospital has a very "unique" gameplay. The building aspect of the game is a matter of organization and how much stuff you can fit inside one room. How does that work? Well...
Let's say you want a waiting room for your patients, you will make a box (or any other shape, if you are feeling brave) and add the essentials. The essentials change depending on the room you wanna make, so let's say here the essentials are basically the reception desk and seats. After adding that, you have the option of boosting its attractiveness. So, adding flower pots, water dispensers, posters, and windows will do that. So, what happens is, you have a room, and your room has little stats you can increase, and increasing those boost the productivity of said room - alongside making a few changes here and there.
Now imagine this for every other room. Examination Room, Nursery, Surgery Room, and so on and so forth. You will do this for every room that is not a hallway.
And while this is not bad per se, it gets tedious (to me). The game is basically broken into how much stuff you can fit inside a cubicle, and you can make that cubicle bigger if you want it to be even better (or until you unlock smaller objects that boost your stats even further for less space). On top of that, you will have your employees, who have their own set of stats and traits, which is good too. But in the end, it doesn't affect the game as much as you'd think. It basically affects their performance but nothing else. A trait can be called "lazy" and all it does is affect how fast they perform an action, it doesn't go beyond that. Mind you, this is an example, I don't really remember if there's a trait that does that.
But moving forward, Two Point released yet another game, called Two Point Campus - and look at that, it is quite similar to the game we are reviewing today! Two Point Campus has the same approach (with QoL of course) that its brother. Your objective here is to graduate your students, in a funny little environment with bizarre classes and all that.
Now, Let's School has this same approach to its game. It's a Two-Pointesque game at its core, or a "Facility Based" game. Whatever name you wanna give it, it has the same vibes as the two mentioned games. Though this is not bad, but in the long run it gets quite boring. You will take students from communities, often close or distant from your school, and you will teach them whatever they wanna graduate on - and you have four types of classes. Art, sports, science, and literature. So, in one class you might have students wanting to graduate in Arts and Sports, and in another, you will have some in Science and Literature.
Organization is key here, and so are your teachers, they also have their own set of stats. You will need "teachers" to handle administration, cafeterias, research, and so on. You have homeroom teachers for every class, and as you research new stuff, you unlock modules and actions that will help you in the long run of your school. So, in the end, it is a very simple game. Put good teachers to work, and get good grades, even if your students are bullies, I had no trouble getting them to behave and score A+ on their exams.
I wasn't expecting the game to be hard, mind you, but something I disliked a lot was definitely the Two-Pointesque thing. I don't like having to fill my small room with the same object only to boost my performance; I like to see my room looking good, cute, realistic even! I don't expect every object to be used, but I want them to feel unique to the place they are, and not a copy and paste of every other classroom (even if I tried to differentiate the rooms).
You will get random events happening in your school, however. Students can befriend one another, they can fall in love apparently, they will bully others, they will bring frogs to the classes, play video games and so on. You will be responsible for assigning a teacher to deal with it and... that's it. Their discipline stat will raise (to show they are behaving) and they will get a demerit. With three, you can expel them. But why would you do that? Well... I don't think there's a reason. A student who has been disciplined will keep doing what they want, I ended up having five students who kept gaming around and they had maybe six or so misconducts.
I didn't get far in the seven hours I played, stopping at the third research tree (there are four, as I write this), and while the game is good and I had fun playing it; I feel like there's a lot to improve here.
Unlike the previously mentioned games, I feel like the developers wanna try a bit of everything here, and that is good; I can ignore the district-building-whatever genre if the school feels like an actual school. It is being sold as a finished game (not early access) but the developers have already sent some hotfixes and I feel like the first week will be full of changes. They promised, too, new content and I think once the Workshop hits, a lot will change.
It is not a bad game, mind you, the art style is pretty cute, having to manage your teachers and all that can be relaxing if you are into it, and it is far easier than most management games. It gives you the opportunity to tweak the difficulty, if you so wish, but I think the point of the game is not exactly managing your school.
I will be playing Sandbox in the next few days and maybe I will edit this review with my experience there, but making a cool school seems like a plan, it has a lot of options to customize your institute and overall the general vibe of the game is good. I can see the developers are putting effort and I expect good things from this game in the future, but as it stands I don't feel that it should be called a "finished game".
A gem with rough corners or something. It is a good game, you can definitely spend time on it and it is not extremely expensive. I definitely can recommend it if you wanna handle a school, but don't expect much in regard to the "sim" part. Then again, I did not go far enough into the career mode to see how the rest of the game is affected by new research facilities, but Sandbox will probably answer most if not all of my questions.
I'd say you can fully enjoy this game as it is, just don't expect to invest a hundred hours into it like you can in other management games (Factorio, Rimworld, Crusader Kings 3... maybe?). It is also not fair to compare this one with others, as it is not fully fleshed out just yet.
Excited to see the next updates, so I will probably come back to this game within a few weeks.