Let’s School Review – For Whom the School Bell Tolls

Sims-like games and Tycoon games have been a staple in the gaming landscape for decades. The Sims, Sim City, Rollercoaster Tycoon, and Zoo Tycoon are some that immediately come to mind. 

One lesser known of the Tycoon games was School Tycoon, a game sold at Scholastic book fairs throughout the U.S. It had the same premise as other similar games, but it revolved around building a successful school. It’s been years since I had an experienceblike that, that is until I played Let’s School.

Let’s School is a school management sim by Pathea Games that puts a lot of focus on the role of headmaster. The player is in charge of nearly every aspect of running a school, from building to staff and student management. Originally released on PC July 27th of 2023, it is now available on the PS5 nearly a year later.

Gameplay

The gameplay of Let’s School is a great balance of complex and easy to grasp. There’s more than one end goal you can work towards, and how you get there is entirely up to you. There’s a lot that goes into running a successful school, and it can test your patience.

Running the Show

As headmaster, you are required to build and arrange the classrooms, plan the classes, hire a staff and student recruiter, create necessary facilities for training and learning, and much more. Luckily this isn’t how the whole game plays, as you can hire a management team in the early stages. They can handle a lot of the monotonous planning tasks so you can focus on the more important things, like setting pandas free in the school and planning field trips.

Students are given academic goals to reach for each semester and school year. To achieve these goals, you must hire or train qualified teachers to teach the appropriate classes.

If a teacher isn’t well qualified, they will be unable to teach the proper classes, and students can suffer from it. At the end of a semester, students are all given an exam. The results can have an effect on every end goal, making good exam results the overall objective.

But, is it Fun?

Here’s where I have to be brutally honest with you about the gameplay. It is extremely subjective, and those not looking for a full simulator kind of experience will possibly be overwhelmed in the early stages. But that’s just part of playing a sim game like this. The real satisfaction comes from finally building that academy that practically runs itself. It’s more about the journey than the destination.

But this doesn’t mean you have to follow a strict path for entertainment. If you’re like me and enjoy experimenting I’m games, there’s some less stressful fun to be had. I myself eventually shirked the duties of headmaster and let the academy barrel downhill, in the name of experimentation.

No classes were scheduled, students were free to roam all day, and there was a full grown panda running rampant. By the end the faculty and student’s satisfaction was extremely low. Just because it’s a simulator doesn’t always mean you have to follow rules and be completely realistic. Part of the fun is testing the limits and pushing it.

The Controller Issue

One problem seems to have plagued this game since its release, and that was the lack of proper controller support. Luckily with it being on console using a controller is finally an option and encouraged. The main problem is it can be a bit frustrating. 

Navigating the at-times cluttered UI can be a hassle, and the sensitivity levels of the thumb sticks is odd. When in game it feels super sensitive, but in the management menu it takes too long to move the cursor from point A to B.

But hey, it helped me notice I have bad stick drift in my spare controller, so that’s a plus, I think? It can be adapted to but overall, it’s obvious a controller wasn’t the intended device for playing this game.

Sound and Graphics

Let’s School is very reminiscent of those old school tycoon game in appearance. It opts for similar graphics, akin to a mid-2000’s game, with a pixelated art style for the in-game pictures. It’s a pleasant aesthetic that many will find appealing and nostalgic. It captures the spirit of its predecessors amazingly in its visuals.

The sound design isn’t anything too special, but it definitely matches the visual aesthetic very well. Most sounds are simply for the various notifications like bells between classes, but the music is a different subject altogether. The music in Let’s School can grow a little monotonous.

There’s only a handful of tracks that loop depending on the scenario. The most egregious of said tracks is in the opening menu, where the same song isn’t even looped properly. It simply plays for roughly a minute and change before partially fading out and immediately restarting. It can get quite annoying quickly. You’re better off streaming music through your PlayStation or simply turning down the music in the settings.

Replayability

If you enjoy games like Let’s School or you just enjoy the freedom to experiment, there’s a high level of replayability here. With no hard-set end goal, you can basically play forever. However, that statement applies mainly to fans of the genre. Some players who pick this game up for the heck of it may not find that to be the case.

Trophy hunters will find plenty of replayability. With 44 to obtain, many of the trophies are so specific that they warrant multiple playthroughs. These include selling students’ snowmen, confiscating 30 contraband, accepting Two-hands Lee’s deal. While many of the trophies could theoretically be earned in one playthrough, the amount of trial and error needed will likely result in at least one extra playthrough of the career mode.

Overall, you can expect to take roughly 35 to 40 hours to complete the game, though as I’ve mentioned previously, the sky’s the limit, since you can just restart a new school any time. And once you’ve done all there is to do, you can always open the sandbox mode and go wild.

Conclusion

Let’s School is a game that can feel niche at times, but it uses that to its advantage. Though an occasional source of frustration, it stays true to what makes people fans of this kind of simulation game. It’s fun overall, but some issues are glaring.

The UI being cluttered for controllers makes this a tough fit for consoles, and while I had lots of fun experimenting and pushing the simulation to the limit, it definitely felt frustrating at times, especially at the beginning.