Everyone’s school days were a range of different challenges. From exams to social drama to the occasional run-in with a schoolyard bully, everyone had a bit of a hard time, but spare a thought for the poor managers who had to keep a building full of hormonal teenagers from descending into chaos. full. Let’s School by Pathea Games (My Time at Sandrock) gives a nod to these brave individuals and shows just how mired in bureaucracy the principal of them all really is. No wonder they always had such a short temper with us.
The gameplay of Let’s School is not that different from other management sims like Two Point Campus. You inherit a dilapidated school from your old principal and are tasked with helping it achieve greatness again. However, where Two Point Campus leans into the whimsy of running an educational institute, Let’s School instead focuses on the mundane tasks required to keep students and staff happy.
Each student comes to you with a certain set of traits based on which region they are from. Rich kids are bad at everything which makes them slow learners, but it comes at a higher toll from their parents. Theater kids are more likely to fight with their peers, but excel in the arts, giving your school more prestige. You can choose which students to accept, so you’ll spend more time than you imagine trying to find the right balance of students to help your school thrive.
When you’re not heartlessly determining a junior’s worth based on a few stats on their application (just like real-life leaders!), you’ll be diving into the rigors of a class schedule to get the most out of your high. . Overworked teaching staff (again, just like real principals.) You have to make sure that each student spends enough time teaching each subject in their upcoming exams to at least pass, but hopefully excel.
This system is the best part of Let’s School simply because it’s such a delicate balancing act. Especially once you start teaching more than the first two subjects, you need to make sure you recruit the right teachers with the right skills to keep your students coming through and that sweet tuition money flowing in. . It’s a lot more valuable than games like Two Point Campus, which mostly rocked this kind of detail, but we enjoyed it a lot more than we expected. Let’s School highlights how schools, despite being there to help students achieve their academic and extracurricular goals, are still businesses.
However, this style of play comes at a cost, as we quickly turned our school into an overcrowded student farm, with an almost assembly-line structure for teaching to ensure maximum output from students and the best cash flow for the school. It was very effective, but it felt a little more soulless than we wanted it to be. It was certainly at odds with the polygonal art style the game introduced us to. There is an attempt at humor at points, especially at the beginning of the tutorial, but it is thrown away too quickly and the game is weaker for it.
Between scheduling classes and making sure your students and staff have the usual essentials like places to eat, drink, and relax, there’s a huge research tree to dive into. allow you to unlock new courses and new features in your school. This is another balancing act since you have to assign your valuable teachers to the research center, which means you have one less educator to impart knowledge to your classes. You’ll also have the chance to train teachers to make sure they’re skilled enough to handle more advanced subjects as your students progress over the years, though the process can be slow until you unlock the higher levels. of your research tree.
Let’s School is incredibly basic to watch, but that’s not the real problem with the visuals. The biggest problem we encountered during our playthrough was watching textures disappear from floors, which made it hard to tell where terrain ended and classes began. We ended up saving and reloading to make sure our school didn’t navigate a strange abyss for an entire academic year. There were also some minor framerate issues in docked mode that caused the game to stutter as we walked around our facility.
The other disappointment we had was how the game ported to the Switch. Some controls felt clunky, like switching between on-screen menus. It wasn’t anything game-breaking, but it was an unnecessary distraction from the serious business of running a school.
After all, that’s what Let’s School really is – a business simulator involving a school rather than a game about running the school itself. Focusing on that side of education is fun, but it loses something along the way. It also renders some features completely useless – what’s the point of running around the school in principal mode, for example, when I have no real incentive to care about the students or faculty I’m interacting with? If the game spent a little more time making us feel like these students were more than just sharp polygons on the screen, it might have helped us feel more invested in them beyond the money and prestige that brought our launch pad to learn.
If you can get over the random errors, clunky menus, and dated visuals, there’s a solid and attractive business sim in Let’s School. We didn’t like the heartless and disconnected depiction of the education system, but that doesn’t mean people won’t be able to spend dozens of hours building the most efficient and utilitarian education center imaginable.
CONCLUSION
Let’s School is a business simulator dressed up as a school simulator, with a heavy focus on the business side of running a school and not so much on the warm and fuzzy feeling you can get from education and helping kids achieve goals Theirs. There are some visual glitches and some frustrating menu layouts to contend with in the Switch version of the game, but there’s a deep, engaging – if a little soulless – emulator here.