Let’s School Xbox Series X Review

Let’s School Xbox Series X Review – We don’t need no education

Pathea Games has previously released the building games My Time at Portia (based around your father’s workshop) and My Time at Sandrock (about rebuilding a desert time). Now it’s My Time at School as the developers put you in the role of a headmaster looking after a failing school. But has Pathea learned their lessons and stayed on course for a hit?

The first choice is either the open-ended Sandbox Mode or the in-depth Career Mode. You edit your Headmaster or Headmistress (including clothing, hair colour and accessories, naming them, or choosing a randomised option) followed by the uniform and emblem for your school. The cutscene shows the Head arriving at a run-down school building to meet Ms Lin. She will be your first teacher once you have started admitting students and assigned them to a class. Accepting the advice from Miss Lin is highly recommended as this will enable the tutorial, teaching you vital lessons as you go.

Much of the work is down in the Options Wheel, holding down the left bumper and moving the right analogue stick to select an option. Construction lets you build things and Demolition lets you knock things down; Schedule allows you to set the curriculum for your classes and Recruitment is necessary to take on more Teachers and Support Staff. Shortly into the Tutorial, you will also unlock the Research option, letting you research new facilities to be added, reforms to improve school life and the ability to open Clubs. Students will make Demands (shown as a question mark icon) that must be met to keep them satisfied and studying hard; from something as simple as adding a lamp (improving their vision in the classroom) to building a Food Tent or Tea Room to keep them fed and watered is vital. Exam day comes around once a week – unless the options are set differently – and pupils must have learnt well enough to pass and reach their future aspirations. There are three Grades to progress through before the pupils will graduate (hopefully). And as you go, Miss Lin gives you another vital task – setting a Victory Goal for the long-term success of your institution.

The Sandbox Mode is pared back, giving you just a bare plot of land in the environment you choose. You create your Headteacher in an equivalent manner and pick the logo and uniform colours as before, but then you are on your own. You must construct the buildings, work out the priorities and fix the problems with less help from Miss Lin. The Victory Goal is also set right near the start and gives regular updates on how you are doing. Keeping the pupils satisfied and passing their exams is even more important here, to keep the finances flowing.

“After a short spell, you will be tired of seeing the urgent yellow and black exclamation mark hovering over menu items that hide something to deal with.”

Unfortunately, Let’s School commits the cardinal sin of management games – piling too many mechanics onto the player at once. If you are not searching the buildings for hornet nests or fighting sudden fires, you are juggling Teacher Training and Research (both of which require assigning vital staff that might be needed elsewhere). The flow of new students wanting admission also proves taxing. Then the small size of the initial building becomes a concern as you need more space for Classrooms, and so Construction becomes even more complex. It took time to learn important controls, such as pressing Y to deal with urgent icons (shown at the top of the screen) and pressing Start rather than A to “confirm” construction. It was too easy to try and back out of a menu by pressing B, only to be told that you are cancelling the efforts you just queued up. After a short spell, you will be tired of seeing the urgent yellow and black exclamation mark hovering over menu items that hide something to deal with. Often you will find yourself in the right menu, and then must press another button to move into the right sub-menu, before then at least two more button presses to act. I also noticed a couple of occasions where tutorial text either obscured or was left behind vital menu options, making things harder to read. It becomes exhausting and shows the interface was not streamlined well for console players.

The actual presentation of the game is mixed. The main view of the school can be zoomed in and out, rotated, and various layers of icons and labels added or removed. While there is not huge detail in the graphics because of this changing scale, what is there is generally reasonable. I only noticed a few problems with pixelated trees and tricky camera angles; most of the time the game copes with showing you the different angles well, and the walls can be “turned off” if required. At times, the display can become a sea of icons and menu bars, but the text itself is usually readable. It is the menu structure itself and the multiple button presses that let it down in comparison to the ease of using a mouse. There are a few cutscenes as the game progresses but not at very high detail. Background music and sounds are essentially filler for a title like this and do the job without intruding too much.

Let’s School Xbox Series X Review Summary:

It is only a shame that Two Point Campus got there first; its mechanics are more focused on providing different types of class, and the game’s humour earns higher praise than Let’s School. Like a real teacher, you need patience and time to get the best out of this game. It may tax your intellect more than your reflexes, but for strategy fans, there is a long-term challenge and something to enjoy.