Campus Life is a third person survival horror game that released just in time for the spooky season on Steam. It’s set in the scariest setting of them all: a college campus. Okay, Campus Life isn’t actually a survival horror game. It’s a third person life sim with a heavy focus on time management. However, the unintentional horror elements come into play when it repeatedly hangs while saving, precipitating another crash and potential loss of progress. Campus Life crashes a lot. In its current state, if you play Campus Life, you seriously need to save often because the game will crash two or three times an hour, making it an absolutely miserable chore to make progress in it.
Simulations set in schools are surprisingly popular, and there’s a GiN review of a great one called Two Point Campus from a couple years back. Campus Life is a sim that tasks you with maintaining your school schedule, hunger, thirst and even your happiness needs to be managed in order to properly learn. On top of all of these, you have to pay for your tuition by doing part time jobs, which is quite possibly the most unrealistic part of this entire game. Having to manage all of your needs while learning and doing various activities is great, and one of the core components of those management titles we all love so much.
There are some things that Campus Life does okay, but there is a lot that needs improvement and makes me feel as if this game was released way too early.
Review Notes
Life sims typically have a large variety of customization options, and Campus Life isn’t terrible when it comes to overall options, but there is a lot to be desired with the starting clothes and hair choices. Some of the hairstyles allow you to see through them to the walls behind the character, while some accessories like watches or boots clip into your character’s limbs. While these are pretty small issues, it exposes Campus Life’s lack of polish from the moment of character creation which really sets expectations low right out the gate.
After making your student, you’ll be treated to a brief tutorial that will show you some of the facilities on campus. Dialogue from characters in Campus Life isn’t voiced, but the characters do speak in a kind of Microsoft Bob style Simlish. The tutorial will run you through the basics of showering to improve hygiene, making food to keep yourself from passing out due to lack of nutrition, and things of that sort. Each activity you do consumes time, so you have to balance your ever-decaying needs with all of your responsibilities like attending classes or working part-time to afford tuition.
Your energy level is managed by sleeping, drinking coffee or energy drinks, and things of that nature. Hunger and thirst can be managed by eating and drinking from vending machines or for free at the school’s cafeteria, which may put you in a time crunch between classes or hanging out with NPCs. Hygiene will require you to shower, and happiness can be obtained by doing things like gaming and makes you way more receptive to learning.
Each activity you do, no matter what it is, will reward you with a large variety of points in exchange for your time, which you can then use to improve your skills. Whether you’re attending lectures, performing self-study, or chatting up an NPC, it will cost you some time and probably energy too. Improving your relationship with NPCs will allow you to go on dates or do other activities with them, though many of these actions you can do with NPCs don’t even have dialogue attached to them. Asking a character out on a date was added around a week after launch, so hopefully the developer continues to expand on these features to make these systems more involved.
The points in body, mind, and creativity you earn from activities can be spent to open up nodes on a large branching skill tree, which will unlock new activities for you like playing chess with people around the campus, which will in turn earn you other points that will contribute toward gaming abilities and other skills on your goals sheet.
There are also the occasional activities where you’ll need to do minigames, such as lifting weights or performing math exercises, though these seem to be quite rare since many other activities are considerably less interactive.
The largest issue with Campus Life is that no matter what activity you’re doing, whether it’s eating, showering, playing a game at the arcade to improve your mood, or attending your classes, all of these tasks are completed the exact same way: You run to the location and then watch a green bar fill for 5-10 seconds. Titles like The Sims get away with this in 3D because you can allow your sims to function autonomously while you, the player, can interact with someone else in the household or drastically speed up time, while games like Growing Up present everything to the player in a visual novel format that allows you to get right into the number crunching of the life/management sim.
Standing in place and watching a meter fill isn’t the largest issue in Campus Life by any means, but it does mean that there’s a lot of downtime between you and the things you want to do.
You could use fast travel instead of running all over campus, but that takes money every single use, as do the vending machines littering the campus, which can be pretty helpful in maintaining your energy, hunger, and thirst because your needs decay fairly quickly. You also need to be making money at various part time gigs all over the campus in order to pay your tuition, which means you’ll have to periodically spend a couple hours making some cash.
Having to manage that tight rope is the core of a strong management sim and could work well here if there weren’t bugs like the activities list or the guidelines breaking.
It likely doesn’t help that navigating the school grounds in Campus Life is more difficult than it should be due to the camera, which will add to a lot of small annoyances when navigating many buildings on the campus. The camera of Campus Life loves to show you the outside walls of the buildings you’re in or of the floor directly above you, so you’ll spend a lot of time watching your character as a gray silhouette through the floor or exterior wall of the building you’re in. The camera will show you through interior walls, just not exterior ones or floors, so if playing on mouse and keyboard, be prepared to have to zoom in quite a ways sometimes.
TLDR
I can’t recommend Campus Life in its current state. The 3D world is large and has a great number of different activities, but almost all of these activities are different flavors of watching a meter fill. The sheer quantity of bugs that can be experienced in just an hour or two of play is far higher than it should be, and if there isn’t a bug impacting your experience of the game at some moment, Campus Life will crash instead. There’s a ton to do in this title, but it attempts to prevent you from interacting with its best parts either due to lack of polish or bug testing. Should the bugs be fixed, this would make a decent life sim with time management qualities, but that’s not where Campus Life is right now.