After putting you in charge of healthcare (terrible idea) and then the education of the next generation (they never stood a chance), the latest and biggest entry in the Two Point series is giving you a job where you can do less damage to your fellow humans: running museums, where the only threat to life and limb is when the caveman defrosts and starts drawing grafiti on everything. While much of what Two Point Museum does is familiar, the folk at Two Point have added a lot to this sequel, making it the deepest and best entry in the breezy simulation franchise to date.
The basic gameplay remains intact. You’ll need to assess the area you have to work with and ponder where to put down break rooms for staff, toilets, workshops, snack machines and more, all while hiring staff to run and maintain everything. The past two games involved creating a lot of rooms to house everything, resulting in a sort of game of Tetris as you figured out where you could jam a new classroom in. Two Point Museum dials this back a bit because the various artefacts you’ve nicked (er, acquired in a perfectly legal and morally suitable fashion?) don’t need to be housed in specific rooms – just chuck ’em down anywhere, really. It’s a change I approve wholeheartedly of.
Available On: PlayStation, Xbox, PC, Switch
Reviewed On: PS5
Developed By: Two Point
Published By: SEGAReview code provided by the publisher.
If Two Point Hospital was about managing staff and handling emergences, and Two Point Campus was setting up your education systems in the off-season before watching it hopefully handle the influx of students, then Two Point Museum is more about figuring out how to herd guests through your buildings. Carefully corralling them so that they see as much as possible during their visit is the name of the game. Using partitions, walls, one-way doors and more you can funnel them around, or opt for a more free-form design. The more they see and do and the more time they spend in your museum, the more chance there is of donating cash, buying some tat and then buggering off home in a good mood.
The overall structure has been gently reworked. You still hop from location to location in a bid to increase each museum’s star rating by completing the increasingly tricky objectives. There’s more freedom this time around, though, with the goal being to earn enough stars to increase the overall curator level. If you get bored or stuck at one location you can pack your suitcase and head somewhere else for a while. In the previous two games, it was easy to stay in just one location and max it out before moving on, never to return. Here, the developers have deliberately designed it so that at certain points it makes sense to head somewhere else and come back later. In fact, your initial pre-history museum becomes like a central hub to return to, a museum that gradually incorporates everything you’ve learned from the others.
Your initial pre-history museum features all the dinosaur bones, ancient fossils and frozen cavemen that you might expect, but things become a bit barmier when you visit other museums. An old hotel focuses on the supernatural, including special ghostly guests that must be housed in custom rooms lest they get bored and start possessing your paying customers. Another museum is all about space and alien artifacts, tasking you with sending people into the galaxy to gather more exhibits and meet alien races like the Cheese Mongers, who will bafflingly come and visit the same exhibits you just took from their territory. There’s even an alien language to decode to power up the artefacts in your museum. Botany and aquatic life feature heavily in other areas, too, letting you mess around with crazy undersea monsters and plants that keep trying to eat the guests. But it’s not like you are stuck to these themes: you can setup a supernatural exhibit right next to the man-eating plants, if you like.
It’s all done with the usual Two Point charm as well. It’s still a joy to zoom in and watch all the little animations playing out, from a guest face planting an exhibit to one of your man-eating plants swallowing someone before spitting them back out. There’s also the familiar female voice issuing dry one-liners over the speakers from time to time. The only thing that’s missing is Ricky Hawthorne radio, which is a real shame.
Like Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus before, you’re ultimately running a business which means keeping an eye on the money going in and out of the place. The game is very forgiving, though, possibly even more so than the previous two entries. If you do start going bankrupt, the game tries to help you, offering loans, sponsorship deals for extra cash and even advice on where you can make some budget cuts.
There’s some room to play with the cash, too. Tickets sold at the door are just one method of bringing in the pennies. If you’re feeling daring you could even allow free entry and rely purely on guests tossing money into the donation bins you place, as well as the trusty gift shop which sells all sorts of pointless tat like cute onesies and plush toys.
There’s also a bigger emphasis placed on security this time around. As the museums grow in stature and as your overall rank increases you’ll become the target of more and more criminals, eventually even drawing the attention of named gangs like the Boggy Boys who come up through the toilets. To counter this, you can setup guard booths, or construct a security room and cameras to act as deterrents. Security gates are an option, although if you still adding too many security measures, guests can start feeling uncomfortable.
At the core of the game is the new expedition system where you dispatch employees via a helicopter to hunt down artefacts and items to display in your museum. Depending on where they are sent, there are a bunch of possible events that can lead to injuries, delays or higher chances of getting something of better quality. Sending people with the right skills will remove or guarantee these events, adding a little layer of strategy to proceedings. Plus, you need to account for the fact that any staff sent out explore some remote corner of the Earth aren’t going to be available to run the museum.
The expedition maps contain multiple locations you can go all Indiana Jones on, and unlocking new areas to visit usually means meeting a bunch of criteria. Some of those might involve doing things back in your museum like achieving a certain knowledge rating or displaying a mixture of themes, as well as building items in a workshop. In this way the game also smartly encourages you to revisit previous museums, too.
As fun as the whole expedition system is, it does become problematic later in the game. You see, the items you can acquire all have a quality rating that plays a part in how guests view it, with the higher rarities boasting a higher buzz. As you survey an area (by sending expeditions and by using special items) you’ll unlock the ability to get these higher rarities, but acquiring them is completely random. A few of the objectives you’ll be given along the way demand you get these high-grade exhibits, leading to dull grinds where you mount expedition after expedition to get what you need. It’s even more annoying when your keeps coming back with one of the other possible items.
As you dig deeper into the game’s various systems, more and more fun but entirely optional levels of depth are revealed. For example, using partition walls and staff-only doors, you can easily construct sections of the museum that only employees can access. Lay these out smartly, and you can create ways for staff members to get across the map quickly and easily. You can also force people to enter and exit through the gift shop for higher cash generation, or assign specific staff members to certain areas, etc. You can muddle through the game without ever doing these things, but if you choose to tinker, you’ll find lots of smart little things to mess with.
A game like Two Point Museum is naturally at home on PC where the numerous menus and building aspects can be handled using a mouse, but for a chance of PC I opted for the PS5 version of the game to see how a controller holds up. The answer is…not great. The root of the issue is that all of the various menus need to first be accessed by pressing a specific button, like square for the building options, down on the D-Pad for messages, triangle for objectives etc. But then various sub-menus also need another button press even when it doesn’t seem to make sense, like having to tap square again to delve into an employee’s pay even though it looks like part of the menu you were already in.
I also encountered a few bugs with the controls. The D-Pad is often very slow to respond, especially compared to the left stick which led to quite a few instances of me selecting the wrong thing. If you always reach for the stick in menus that won’t be an issue, but I tend to swap to the D-pad when navigating menus, so it became a persistent annoyance.
I also found a strange issue with the controls lagging or sometimes ceasing to work altogether after placing items. It seems to get locked into a mode that I can’t get out of without tapping the touchpad, then backing out of the menu that pops up. That seems to return the controls to normal.
There’s also an issue with the tour pathing that sends your carefully planned route across the entire building for no reason, in turn ruining the tour’s rating.
It can be tricky to figure out exactly why your museum isn’t making money, too. Investigating guests and menus might reveal that people believe the tickets are fairly priced, and the exhibits are great but no explanation for why guest happiness isn’t higher. In the end, the problem might be obvious (staff salaries are often the biggest cause of pathetic bank balance) and you can sort it out, but more frequently than I’d like I was left struggling to discover where it was all going wrong.
There’s a sandbox mode included with plenty of sliders and options – as well as 3 difficulty settings – for anyone looking for something more challenging. As much as I enjoyed the freedom offered in the sandbox, I didn’t spend much time messing around with it as the campaign feels like the star exhibit. Even if it does get a grindy in a few places, its tour of the museums and the different mechanics was a joy.
In Conclusion…
Two Point Museum takes a series I already adore and somehow makes it even better in almost every way. It’s a carefully curated exhibition of what makes the series so highly entertaining, but with some excellent new additions. Those looking for a stiff challenge or a meatier, chunkier experience won’t find Two Point Museum’s breezy simulation a challenge, but for those like myself who want something lighter, Two Point Museum is a superb game and the best Two Point title to date.
