Two Point Museum Review

Who doesn't love a sandbox simulation game that basically lets you build things? From Rollercoaster Tycoon to The Prehistoric Kingdom, you have a wide variety of these kinds of building games that are incredibly fun to play and often serve as a casual and relaxing version of the more strategic-oriented building games.

They also appeal to games that are more interested in economics and management aspects of things. These games have spread to all parts of the gaming ecosystem, from Android to Flash Web. And if you really enjoyed creating those fun-themed parts of your amusement park, you'll have a blast with this game.

Developed by Two Point Studios, Two Point Museum is a simulation-building game in which you design and manage five different types of museums. It isn't that simple, however, as you'll have to deal with unruly guests, thieves, curators, and even worse… children. The developers have worked on similar games before, with Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus being their other games with similar themes.

The game has this sort of whimsical and quirky sense of humor with a fun art style that lends well to the theme of the game. As previously mentioned, the game is about building and managing your own museum and turning them into the best damn museums in the world. To do this, you need to have various fun exhibits and keep people intrigued and interested as they visit your museum.

At the beginning of Two Point Museum, you take over your first museum, which looks a bit drab and almost empty. You get yourself a box with a large exhibit: a fossilized footprint of a big dino. Placing it in the designated location will now increase your Buzz.

Now, what is Buzz? It basically measures the excitement and enthusiasm of visitors seeing your attraction. The better it is presented, the higher the Buzz. Similarly, certain attractions require specific prerequisites. Sometimes, they also give bonuses when in specific places or paired with specific decorations.

Over time, however, your exhibits and attractions will deteriorate, and you need some experts to restore them. To this end, you need to hire an expert. These experts specialize in one of the fields, and for your purposes, you'll need a Prehistoric Expert to maintain that fossil footprint.

You'll notice that your hires have a skill meter that slowly grows over time, making them better at their jobs. They also have different references, giving them buffs and debuffs. They go around cleaning the exhibits, and while they do that, you'll need to improve your museum some more.

You'll find the next main sort of resource. This is Knowledge, and it increases based on how much information you present about a certain place. So, put up a few information boards and watch the count grow.

Afterward, you need to set up a ticket booth and hire assistants to man it, and you'll be golden. Selling tickets naturally earns you money, and from here, it's mostly just earning money from tickets and donations, and expanding your collection of exhibits.

But wait, for your donations, you'll need to place a donation box and recruit your first security guard, who, as you will soon find out, has much more important uses than this. Once you have some money going around for yourself, you'll be able to send out expeditions.

Expeditions in Two Point Museum are what you use to find new exhibits. You need to use the helipad and select a destination, sending out one of your experts to a specific area to look for exhibits. Now, you'll need a suitable team, and you need to be quick, too, as there are other teams looking for exhibits as well.

At first, you'll only be able to go around to one or a few places, but later, you'll be able to unlock other locations and find more interesting exhibits. Going back to the expeditions themselves. These expeditions have various events that might happen while they are going in, making it so that there's a chance your people get injured or find something really cool.

You can have a speedy expedition, a normal one, or a detailed one. The longer you take, the better your survey is, which increases the chances of finding a good exhibit. During expeditions, your experts may get injured or worse. And injured experts will have reduced work rates.

To remedy this, you'll need to create a staff room where experts and other workers can heal and rest up, improving their work rates. You'll also need to hire janitors to keep everything clean. You don't want to be dirty, now do you?

Employees accumulate experience through their work, and if you design a suitable learning setting, they can participate in additional training. This furnishes them with useful new talents, but it also prompts them to request greater compensation.

Some exhibits can be a part of larger exhibits, such as dinosaur bones. You'll be able to display full skeletons if you can find them all. These expeditions are your primary and really only way of getting new exhibits, and you'll be sending them out all the time. To improve their odds of doing good, you'll need more people and better equipment.

Your expeditions will often ask you for decisions on what to do, and they act like pop-up events in any building game. In Two Point Museum, these expeditions are integral to expansion and earning more money. Since you start off with a lot, you shouldn't need to worry about running out yet. Later on, however, management between earnings and expenditures from expeditions needs to be monitored closely.

You may, and will often, get duplicates of items. And some of these will be less valuable than the other ones you will get. To this end, you can get your experts to analyze the ones that are less valuable. This happens in a lab and basically destroys that exhibit, but gives you more Knowledge on Prehistoric things. This, in turn, allows you to set up more information on them. Which then leads to unlocking more decorations.

It's not exactly a system that makes too much sense since you should be able to get more out of researching these exhibits. Alternatively, however, you can always sell it off for more cash. And you'll need it since there are a lot of sinks for cash.

The Workshop is one of those sinks. Here, you can get new structures for your museum. This includes some rides, attractions, and other exhibits that aren't just plaques on the wall. You can also get things like First Aid kits made here.

Eventually, you'll get access to other museums themed around different things. This includes museums about the underwater world and an aquarium, so to speak. Here, you'll need to maintain the temperature, hire underwater experts, and basically repeat the same things from the first museum.

This also applies to the other three, which revolve around botany, desert, the supernatural, and space. You have different requirements for each. For the botany one, it's very simple: You just need to maintain plants.

However, in the supernatural museum, you'll have to deal with ghosts, who are kept in special rooms and basically treated as exhibits. They have their needs and expect themselves to be fully accommodated. Hilariously enough, the experts in charge of them are therapists, it seems, since the ghosts go to them for therapy.

The gameplay loop presented here is fun, if a little long-winded and repetitive at times, more so than in the earlier games. The expeditions really draw things out and make you wish you could get exhibits in other ways.

Two Point Museum is visually charming and initially captivating, immersing players in a bustling museum environment. However, the gameplay's appeal diminishes after a few hours, primarily due to its over-reliance on expeditions for progression. While the game provides greater design flexibility than Two Point Hospital, with enhanced building customization and themed areas, it lacks the sustained challenge and varied gameplay of its predecessors.

The core gameplay loop revolves around expeditions to unlock new exhibits and decorations, leaving a void of diverse challenges and long-term goals. Unlike the Hospital's patient management or the Campus's student education focus, the Museum prioritizes building and decorating, which, while enjoyable for design enthusiasts, results in a somewhat repetitive experience.

There's a noticeable absence of complex management systems, such as transport optimization or resource bottlenecks. Although the game features interconnected museum management, requiring players to revisit earlier locations, this doesn't fully compensate for the repetitive nature of the gameplay. Positively, Two Point Museum shines in its visual design, user-friendliness, and humor, offering a fun and creative building experience.

Compared to Two Point Hospital, the hardest in the series, and Two Point Campus, the easiest, Museum falls in the middle, leaning towards the easier side. It shifts the focus from people management to building management. While it introduces challenges like thieves and expedition emergencies, they don't resolve the lack of long-term motivation.

Visually, Two Point Museum is great. It looks adorable, almost comic-like, and there's always something interesting going on. It is mostly comparable to Rollercoaster Tycoon in the cutesy and somewhat whismsical style. Everything is hilarious and exaggerated, and the humor rarely misses. Its UI also does a good job of keeping up the atmosphere.

The music and sound design in these games aren't really a major point, and as such, Two Point Museum doesn't do much in this regard. Despite that, the music does a decent job of keeping up the cutesy, cozy vibe.

One of the best parts about Two Point Museum is the trademark PA, which now announces the most useless things at the randomest of times. Sometimes, it's a hilarious quip; other times, you'll be wondering who exactly it is indicated to.

Two Point Museum is very sandbox-like. You have free reign on where to build, and although your space is sort of limited, it is still massive. You have very few restrictions on where you can build and how you can place structures, exhibits, and decor, even being able to construct walkways, walls, and doors. This gives you a very creative reign over things.

Ultimately, Two Point Museum is a fun but shallow experience. A lot of the game reminds of games like Planet Zoo, despite being very far from each other in terms of graphics. It's mainly a very casual building and decorating simulator. It offers an appealing initial experience that becomes repetitive due to its reliance on expeditions and limited gameplay diversity. If you enjoy the building aspects of previous Two Point games, you'll likely find enjoyment, but those seeking a challenging and varied management simulation game may be left wanting.