Let’s School! PS5 Review
Summary: An otherwise solid school management game that is let down by a poor UI and unclear feedback from almost all actions.
3.1
Frustrating
Let’s School! By Pathea Games is, as the name suggests, a quirky strategic management game where the player assumes the role of the administrator of a Japanese school.
Tasked with building it up from nothing and providing the best education possible, all the while maintaining a healthy bank balance.
It’s a relatively standard take on the management genre. Fans of the Two Point series and the like will feel at home here.
Gameplay on a moment-to-moment basis sees the player building new classrooms and other buildings necessary for a school, bathrooms, gymnasiums, a food court, and the like. Teachers and other staff need to be hired, each has their own stats, and potential advantages and disadvantages as well as salary requirements.
Unlike a lot of games of this type, your students aren’t just given to you. The player is in full control of admissions and can vet their student intake. This plays into the goals of each school. Do you design and build that aims to teach only the best of the best? Or does take in people from anywhere and take a more general approach?
Scheduling is an important part of Let’s School!, too. Each student has subject requirements that need to be met in order to pass their exams, and producing a weekly schedule that caters to all students to hit the highest success rate is incredibly important.
Let’s School! goes for a cute, low poly look, graphically and it works really well. All the models are chunky and easily readable even when zoomed out. It’s a very charming visual style that ties the world together nicely.
This type of genre naturally is a perfect fit for PC as a mouse makes navigating through menus and accurately placing objects a breeze. With that said, the controls on PS5 are generally fine, aside from the fact that there’s no option to rebind anything and the camera controls cannot be tweaked other than sensitivity.
The UI, however, is far from great. Not so much how it looks, that’s fine and rather charming. More how the UI responds to the player. It constantly assaults you with information. It’s not possible to examine one aspect of your school without having everything else shoved in your face at the same time.
There’s a real problem with input feedback. It’s often unclear what is being selected or what a given button press is going to do. I found it very unintuitive and frustrating to play because of it. It did get better over time, but navigating the menus never felt particularly natural, or easy.
Out of curiosity, I downloaded the demo of the PC version to see if it was an issue that persisted across both platforms. As expected, with a mouse the game plays as you’d expect with none of the issues the PS5 version exhibits and was a far better experience.
Final Thoughts
Strategy and management games have always had a tricky time of things when ported to consoles and Let’s School! Has unfortunately not done anything to alleviate that.
The core gameplay is good, fun even. There’s a deep and expansive management game here, it’s just a shame that everything it’s wrapped up in soured the experience for me somewhat. Due to the issues I felt the game was more frustrating than fun and ended up dropping it rather quickly.
If you badly need to play Let’s School! I’d recommend the PC version over it on PS5 but ultimately whether this works for you is going to come down to whether you can get beyond all the strange UI and control issues that the game has.
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