[Review] Let’s School – Nintendo Switch
Developed By: Pathea Games
Published By: PM Studios
Categories: Simulation, Tycoon
Release Date: 07.16.24
Price: $19.99
*Game Download Code graciously provided for the purpose of review.

Let’s School is honestly a behemoth when it comes to this genre because of the amount of content. It isn’t just about building a school, but the complete management experience. You can build the school any way you want with endless possibilities and end up spending hours. But you also get to manage every little aspect of your school from faculty and class schedules to the sanity of the students.

The game doesn’t skimp out either when it comes to how big you can make your school. This was something that I was skeptical of at first because I love games where you get to build stuff whether it’s cities, theme parks, or other things. But I love building and those other games rarely do a good job at making the areas big enough to keep me satisfied. 

But Let’s School gives you a huge map, enough to build not just a school but a massive campus. You could build a massive building or a cluster of multiple buildings with athletic fields, a museum, or other facilities across a huge map. You can even build each building up to eight floors so the amount of stuff you can cram into a single campus is mind-blowing.

Outside of the building aspects, you deal with admitting new students, bringing in faculty, setting up classes and their schedules, and prepare your school for the apocalypse. What do I mean by that? There’s a wide arrange of things that can go wrong such as an earthquake destroying your school or fires. 

So now you’re building the school and managing stuff while also trying to balance things like lighting, temperature, and sanitation. On top of that, each student has different traits, an inventory and levels of both stress and discipline. It’s really like managing a real school with so much to do.

But with a lot of content comes a lot of confusion. There’s so much going on that the process of teaching you all the mechanics can become unbearable at times. When you’re playing the career mode, you’re given. Small starter school to work with but the first hour or so was inundated with tutorial after tutorial explaining how to do things. You also start off with a small amount of room types and furniture and as you unlock more, the mechanics you have to remember gets more convoluted. 

After playing the career mode for a few hours I decided to try sandbox mode so I could immediately build the best school I could build but without doing more of the career mode, I had no idea what many of the rooms were for or specific mechanics. I wasn’t able to get a full understanding of playing the sandbox mode until after I had already put in 10 hours into career mode.

Those beginning hours are difficult with all the learning you have to do but once you have an understanding for what you need to do, you can easily master both modes and have a blast. I didn’t care too much for the career mode and gave up on it once I had an understanding of the mechanics so that I could fully invest in the sandbox mode and build the biggest and coolest school of all time.  

Granted, if you’re not incredibly patient with seeing hours of tutorials, you might not stick around long enough for the game to get good. But if you love building, management, and tycoon games you’re going to have a blast with Let’s School. You’ll put some effort into career mode and then you’re going to be let loose in the sandbox mode as you fine tune the school of your dreams. 

The game is also super cheap for something that boasts this much content. You could easily spend more than 60 hours and it only costs $20. So even if you get bored quickly because of the amount of text and tutorials, you can still get your money’s worth and if you end up playing the game a lot, you’ll get so much value. It’s a day one pickup if you like this genre. 

4/5

16 Jul, 2024