Two Point Studios injects their games with the personality and life I find the management game genre is often missing. First they brought us Two Point Hospital (as featured in our Popular Simulation Games article), then Two Point Campus and now Two Point Museum. The dedicated development team bring regular updates and countless DLCs to Two Point Museum has everything you could want to make a perfect or moderately traumatizing Museum experience.
Two Point games are known for the fun, chaotic and weird universe they create. In Two Point Museum, they’ve honed their weirdness into an addictive routine of leveling up your staff, going on expeditions and monitoring your exhibits to make sure they don’t get stolen, or eat a paying visitor. If you’ve played Two Point games before, you’re familiar with the funny radio stories, gentle tunes and cheeky (and mildly passive aggressive) voice over the loud speaker. It brings great life and personality that can be missed by management sim games.
Management Sim Gameplay
There are two modes: campaign and sandbox. To unlock items, expeditions and features in the sandbox mode you have to complete those base tasks in the campaign areas. Stunning builds are possible in both modes. My decoration skills aren’t great so I prefer to build on what you make in each area in the campaign. At any point, you can go back and add exhibits and new areas as you progress through the game in different ways. But the sandbox is a complete free for all, letting you create the museum of your dreams. Campaign mode as you’d expect, provides motivation and goals for your museum to meet to gain a better rating, so I never feel lost like if it was completely open ended in the development.
Two Point Museum eases you in with their Prehistory exhibits. Travel the Bone Belt to dig up the dinosaurs and civilizations of time gone by. You may find a dinosaur, or a fossilized floppy disk and occasionally a man-eating plant. Each Museum in the campaign mode introduces one or two new areas to explore and multiple types of items to put in your museum. You can build aquariums, rooms to house ghosts, build forgotten inventions and even items you’ve found on Cheese planets.
The animation details are so much fun. While you can fast forward time, taking a moment to zoom in and see how the visitors are exploring the museum is worth the slow moments. It’s sometimes disturbing when you find someone climbing on an exhibit or stepping through space portals — no one reads the don’t touch signs. But it’s funny to see how those visitors manage. Send janitors into the workshop and develop the interactive exhibits add great fun for your visitors. By improving their visit the more they donate or spend in the gift shop. The unique themed interactive exhibits always end up with queues of 5+ people.
Expert Effects – Unique Mechanics
With each new type of exhibit from the base game or from the DLC add-ons, Two Point Museum introduces new and unique mechanics for your experts. Science has your experts take on the role of inventors, expeditions have you find lost blueprints for inventions, bring them to life in the workshop. Fantasy Finds introduces Potion Masters and experts with Dungeons and Dragons style stats to form the perfect expedition party. Zooseum DLC has your experts (Zookeepers) become proficient in animal welfare to prevent disease spreading through your enclosures. The newest DLC addition is the Art Gallery. Enter resident artists to your museum, they create and perform exclusive artwork. Teach them emotional intelligence to help broaden their artistic horizons.
Each museum you build in the campaign mode doesn’t have to have all of the exhibit types. You can be selective and mix and match based on your theme and vision for that location. With the unique mechanics that come with the different experts make each new area a challenge in different ways. It can affect your other staff too, studying the supernatural isn’t for the weak, neither is being a janitor for the supernatural.
Conclusion
Two Point Museum is not your ordinary management sim. Updates with new mechanics and quality of life updates, on top of the unique personality and exhibits within the game. While Museum is my favorite in the Two Point County franchise, I recommend your checkout Campus and Hospital too. With each new game the development team only gets better and better.
Two Point Museum is available on all consoles and PC – Check out the Steam page here
