Two Point Museum Upholds the Franchise’s High Standards [Review]

There’s nothing I love more than putting on a good management sim and entering a happy place where the numbers keep going up and eggs don’t require a guarantor. Enter Two Point Museum, the latest entry in the Two Point Studios franchise. And while it might not be the best game I’ve ever played, I really did enjoy it a lot.

What Two Point Museum Is About

Like Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus before it, Two Point Museum is set in the titular Two Point County, a sort of video game equivalent to Springfield from The Simpsons. This time around, players are a museum curator that’s responsible for creating a great learning experience for knowledge-hungry Two Pointers. In the game, you can create museums featuring exhibits ranging from dinosaur bones to mysterious monoliths and man-eating plants. The goal is to get people viewing your exhibits so you can make more money, get “stars” to fully complete levels, and just, in general, make the best museum you can imagine.

Two Point Museum’s Core Gameplay Loop Is Addicting

If you’ve played a Two Point game before, you’ll pretty much immediately understand how Museum works. Your goal is to get people coming to your museum by making it more appealing through decorations, exhibits, and other goodies. You then get in a cycle of using the money you make to further improve the museum, thus resulting in more money. Captialism, ho!

While the main mechanics of Two Point Museum are familiar, there are a fair number of little differences between the game and its predecessors. To get new exhibits and various other goodies, you’ll send your staff to a bunch of exotic locales, where various things can happen to them. Your staff can even die while on an expedition. The exhibits that you gather all have different requirements both to function and to generate “buzz,” which is one of the big stats that brings people to your museum.

The core gameplay loop of Two Point Museum was addicting, often pulling me in for several hours at a time. I also found, more than in any other Two Point game, that I put a lot of time into thinking about the design and layout of rooms. With Campus and Hospital, I’ve always felt like I was trying to shove whatever I needed to build into whatever spot was available. Those games also suffer from scope creep in which you end up having to build a lot of the same thing, especially as you get later in the game. Two Point Museum feels like it rewards being intentional and thinking about the design of your space.

Although the core gameplay loop is strong, it does still have the same issues as the other Two Point games, in that there are times where your progression grinds to a screeching halt. You’ll find yourself waiting on one thing, whether that be enough funds for an expedition or an expedition to come back, that can add some extra tedium to the game that wasn’t as present in Hospital, though it’s not nearly as slow as Campus could be.

Part of this is because what you get on expeditions is up to random chance. While the game does seemingly do a great job of stacking the dice in your favor when it comes to quest items, it’s really easy to find yourself pulling the same item over and over again, never quite getting what you want in a timely manner. That leads to Two Point Museum sometimes feeling a bit boring, even if it never really crosses the line into a full blown snooze fest.

Two Point Museum Is More Linear Than Campus and Hospital

In Hospital and Campus, there’s a certain pace at which you generally approach different levels. Normally, you’ll boot one up, get your first star, and then either bounce to the next level or try for the next star. Once you have that first star, though, there’s nothing really holding you back. There’s also often a lot of advantage to switching levels, since it’ll get you access to more things that can help you succeed. One of the things that’s more frustrating about those games is it can sometimes feel like you’re being asked to do more with fewer resources, and it’s impossible to know when that’s happening until it’s happening.

Two Point Museum‘s main game is a lot more linear than Campus or Hospital. Early on, the game trains players to leave and come back to a certain level after doing other things. It’s, in fact, required to do that in order to get more stars. As such, getting two stars in one level can often directly involve getting one star in another. This linearity ends up being something of a double edged sword.

The game does a better job than either of its predecessors at teaching you how to play the game, which is great. The learning curve isn’t nearly as frustrating as Campus, and in general, I always felt like Two Point Museum was scaffolding my knowledge effectively. Items are basically unlocked when you need them, and the game is clear when you’re wasting your time and need to move on.

There’s a real sense that Two Point Studios put a lot of thought into the design of Museum. The game feels really well put together, and that linearity does help with some of the repetition, though it doesn’t entirely fix it. Two Point Museum feels intentional, and I love that.

At the same time, Museum feels like a much smaller game at launch than either Campus or Hospital. From a straight numerical perspective, Museum has five levels at launch, while Campus and Hospital had 12 and 15, respectively. More isn’t always better, and Museum‘s levels are generally pretty well-designed, but the lack of options makes the linearity, at times, almost painfully obvious.

It seems likely to me that the lower number of initial levels was a purposeful choice, with Two Point Studios opting to focus on depth rather than breadth. However, Two Point Museum still feels like it could have benefited from another level or two. Pretty much every level you encounter introduces a new mechanic, meaning there’s no level where it feels like all of that comes together in a truly satisfying way.

There are, as a note, challenge levels, where you’ve got to accomplish some specific goal, and I found them both perfectly acceptable and utterly forgettable.

The Presentation Is Great, But the UI Can Be Finicky

Two Point Museum has a great presentation and retains the same tongue-in-cheek humor that the franchise is known for. There aren’t many graphical changes compared to Campus and Hospital, but the game has a sort of timeless quality that makes it easy to ignore that. From a technical perspective, it runs smoothly, and I only encountered one glitch over the course of my time with the game. However, that glitch does get into one of my other issues with the game: The UI can be a bit finicky at times.

I never found the finickiness to impact what I was doing in any major capacity, but I did find myself sometimes moving the camera around trying to get a proper grip on what I was looking for, and sometimes I had to go through multiple steps to do something that should have been simple, like expand a room or building. The oddest issue that I encountered was that I build a helipad too close to a wall, meaning that it couldn’t be used. However, I wasn’t able to alter the building directly. Instead, I had to use a tool to literally just destroy the building and start from scratch. It wasn’t too major, but it was very confusing while it was happening.

Verdict: Recommended

Overall, I really like Two Point Museum, and the game falls somewhere between Campus and Hospital for me. Museum fixes the pacing problems that made Campus often feel like a slog, while not falling into the micromanagement trap of the late game portion of Hospital. At the same time, the game can still be tedious at times, and I do wish there were more levels.

Not every part of the title clicks perfectly, but Two Point Museum is a fun, charming game that I absolutely recommend to lovers of management sims.

A PC review code was provided by the published for the purposes of this review. Two Point Museum officially releases on March 4, with early access available five days prior to that.