Mini Review: Let's School (PS5) - School Management Sim Fails to Make the Grade

Let’s School is a management simulator which will have you rebuilding a school back to its former glory. Once a student of the educational institution and now its headmaster, it only makes sense that the first ever school you manage will be one days away from financial ruin.

The game misses out on any humanity by treating the school purely as a business. Students are just statistics to earn money, with teachers the tools to earn them and keep them happy so the cash keeps rolling in. There’s no individuality to the pupils past the area they’re from defining what subjects they need to study.

Let’s School throws out some interesting mechanics which stop it from becoming stale and making it a rinse-and-repeat daily chore. The scheduling option allows you to set the plan for each class, throwing in extra classes and removing unnecessary ones to ensure they achieve at least a passing grade in their weekly exams. There’s also a fun element which has you creating rules based on student applications as to which route they'll take through the school, allowing you to spend less time micromanaging student applications and more time focusing on the actual management of your school.

Unfortunately, this is a double-edged sword. As much as this is fun to play around with, once you’ve got a recipe that works and allows a strong student pass rate, there’s really no need to go back and amend these, and the game just runs itself.

Visually, Let’s School is nothing special. At current state, there remain some issues with rooms disappearing while building, placed items disappearing, and the game insisting that deleted items are still there. Restarting usually fixes these problems, but it's a frustrating cycle to be in. Audio wise, it’s even less special and is reminiscent of elevator music; we ended up muting it and just sticking a podcast on, it was so uninspiring.

Let's School is a moderately okay management sim, which will definitely help you wile away a few hours. A lack of humanity lets it down and makes what could have been a very personable experience into another cog in the machine, taking away any individuality and losing the benefit of having the setting in a school environment by treating school life as purely transactional.