Let's School review: Management Sims 101

That said, if managing endless menus isn’t your idea of a relaxing night in, you can let the game take care of it for the most part. You can bulk assign students to classes, and all lessons will have teachers automatically assigned as long as one is available. It lets you set everything up with broad strokes, only needing you to step in where there’s a problem.

You have to give careful consideration to how all of these things are managed though, which is where that bureaucracy I mentioned earlier comes in. Every teacher, including the principal who oversees the school, has a management stat, meaning only so much can be assigned to them before they become overwhelmed. This means not only are you carefully prevented from expanding too far too soon, but you have you create different departments with their own managers to lighten everyone’s load.

The game doesn’t force you to do this, but the mechanics push you into inventing strategies to deal with these bureaucratic burdens, and it was only after the fact that I realized I had created the same solutions that most schools typically do.

It’s not afraid to let you fail either. You get a one-time bail-out if your cash hits the red (which I found out the hard way), but aside from that, if you screw the pooch, your only option is starting all over again. While running out of cash is the only hard fail state, there are many different ways you can fall into it.

Along with their management, teachers have a couple of other stats like how good they are at research or teaching, and if you don’t keep them up to scratch with regular training, they’ll start to fall behind their student’s level, leaving them unable to teach. What’s more, once my initial batch of first-year students all passed with flying colors, I discovered to my horror that I hadn’t researched any of the second-year classes, meaning they were stuck with nothing to do for a few days while I got that done, meaning they fell behind.

It’s that classic management sim puzzle where you have to work out how to keep all these different plates spinning while still trying to expand your operation in lots of different directions. A gameplay loop that Let’s School excels at.

There are frustrations though. Playing on the newly released PS5 versions, the console controls could’ve done with some refinement. When building rooms, buttons are intelligently assigned, letting you activate each various sub-menu before letting you scroll through it. However, in most other places I found myself having to use far too many buttons for something that would’ve just been point-and-click on PC. 

The control tutorials could do with a rework too, as there was one function – hearing teacher/student demands – that it never explained, and I could never work out how to do it on a controller. Even without knowing that this is a port of a PC game, you would easily be able to tell that this game was designed primarily for a mouse and keyboard.

Plus, it eventually runs into the problem that a lot of management sims do, where eventually you “solve” it, which makes it feel like there’s no point carrying on. There may still be more content, but you eventually reach a point where your finances are firmly in the green, everything’s running smoothly on its own, and you’re just sitting around waiting for either something to go wrong or for the next bit of content to be unlocked.

The game is able to put this off a bit longer than some with random events like fires and earthquakes, a world map that expands your student pool, and four different victory conditions to work towards. It still wasn’t enough to keep my attention until I got there though, I reached a point where I knew reaching a victory condition was just a matter of sitting around long enough, so I was satisfied and let it go.

This is where a story would’ve been nice. Some story elements exist, but it’s mainly for tutorial purposes, or at least enough creative options to keep me engaged. Building a big, cool-looking school was fun, but once I’d done it, there was no reason to go any further or expand any bigger aside from making a few numbers get bigger.

It leaves Let’s School in an interesting place. It may eventually run out of steam, but everything up until that point is a joy to play, even if it didn’t make the smoothest jump to consoles. If you’re a fan of management sims or a school setting, then this will satisfy both points, just don’t expect it to be the kind of game you’ll be constantly coming back to.

Score: 7/10

Version tested: PS5