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I make no fact that I love the Two Point series. Having grown up with Theme Hospital, Two Point Hospital was freaking awesome as both a spiritual sequel and an homage. Two Point Campus faltered a bit, but it was still fun. Now, it’s the third installment of a Two Point game; Two Point Museum.
SEGA actually let me preview Two Point Museum for quite a bit a few weeks back. Make sure to read up on my impressions of the beta build of the game then, and then see what’s changed in this review!
Honestly, there’s not a lot of difference between the preview and the final build…which begs the question of whether the game is good or not.
I have the answer.
What is Two Point Museum?
Two Point Museum is a simulation game in the vein of Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus. It is developed by Two Point Studios and published by SEGA. The game will be available from March 4 on the Playstation and Xbox consoles and the PC.
Our review code was generously provided by SEGA! Thanks so much!
Like its brethren, Two Point Museum sticks with a familiar formula but with a twist.
Instead of running a hospital or a campus, now you’re running a museum. Familiarity with the series is a definite plus, as the personalities (well, the radio ones at least) are all returning from past games in the series.
In that sense, despite this being a different styled game that Two Point Hospital or Campus, this feels like a sequel of sorts. Like you merely took an elevator to a higher floor in the same building. It’s something that I have to applaud Two Point Studios for. If nothing else, the similarities between the games means that you’re squared away with the basics before you even play the game (if you’ve played any of the other games in the series).
When I previewed the game a few months back, I was mightily impressed with how fun it was to run a museum. Compared to a hospital or even a campus, there’s an entirely different dynamic to how you’re running things.
In fact, Two Point Museum is perhaps the most intuitive of the Two Points series. A ton of the micromanaging that was present in Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus have been eliminated completely or streamlined.
Case in point, controller support.
It was a bit haphazard on Two Point Campus, and non-existent on Two Point Hospital (yup, the PC version still doesn’t have controller support, despite there being console versions of the game). In Two Point Museum, the controller support shines. The shortcuts are intelligently mapped and traversing the menus is all painlessly done.
I simply love that you can address staff complaints directly with a button shortcut now and get to work on raising their happiness without delving into menu upon menu.
It’s also perhaps due to the fact that you won’t constantly be building rooms this time around. Instead, the majority of the time is spent arranging artifacts and making sure they synergize off the decorations to gain as much buzz as possible.
Buzz makes the people happy with your exhibits and happiness makes them donate money to your museum. It’s a bit roundabout way to get cash, but it all works. Whether you’re running an aquarium or a prehistoric museum or even a supernatural attraction, the money making works in the same way.
It works very well…initially. Then you realize that to maximize the buzz you get from the decorations, you’re basically forced to place items close together. The downside to that is that it creates congestion in the later parts of the game, where you have masses of visitors all clumped together because your exhibits are close to each other.
If you opt to spread out your exhibits, you run into another issue; space. There’s not a lot of room (until you get further in and are allowed to buy space) to stuff your exhibits in because the museums start off rather cramped.
The prebuilt ones especially don’t make optimal use of space. I pretty much bulldoze everything from the second museum onwards then rebuild from the ground up to be more efficient..
I do have to question whether Two Point might have bitten off a bit too much for the initial game. There’s a ton of variety with the museums but the gameplay elements are mostly one-offs. I mean that you’ll rarely use elements or rooms for a specific museum type in maps that are not theirs.
For example, if you’re building an aquarium, the paranomal unlocks you have will never be required.
Perhaps Two Point Studios is a bit wary of the criticism it got for the deluge of similarly playing DLCs for Two Point Hospital that it overcompensated by trying to stuff in as many different types of museums into the base game as they could.
As a result, some of the more radical museums (such as a supernatural museum) comes across as shallow and one-shot wonders, instead of being part of an integrated experience like how Two Point Hospital was.
Hunting special ghosts in certain stages is such a great idea that’s not fleshed out. In fact, even in the supernatural museum stage, it’s barely touched upon. I would’ve loved to hunt named cryptids like Bigfoot or Nessie to display in the museum!
Alas…that’s not possible.
I’m holding out hope that the inevitable DLCs fleshes out all the individual museums (especially the aquarium, supernatural and space museums) and incorporates much of their individual schticks into the whole enchilada.
Other potentially great ideas (like specially named staff members) are explored but never made into a gameplay fixture for the other stages. I feel like this could’ve been a major draw to the game if developed and integrated properly. Instead of nameless staffers you hire anew for every museum, you could have named ones with special stats that you can get if you’re good enough.
It’s a bizarrely overlooked opportunity to make staffing a much more rewarding experience than it is right now.
In fact, staffing is an issue in the game.
I barely care who I hire, especially if there’s an urgent need for more manpower. Two Point Studios really need to make hiring a more interesting process. That, and an overhaul for how staff level up.
Or rather, the middling rate of XP that staff members get for doing work related tasks. It takes ages to get to the higher levels (which in turn unlocks more special skill slots). The XP rate was fine in previous games, but I feel that Two Point Museum made it much, much slower to level staffers.
Slower staff leveling aside, Two Point Museum also has some technical issues.
Queues can be broken if there are too many people queueing for anything. Especially if there are kids in the queue. Due to them being bound to adult NPCs, the kids can jostle other NPCs out of their place in the queue. This makes those NPCs stuck and unable to progress in the queue. In turn, they block other NPCs behind them. This clogs up the queue, with nobody moving.
It basically results in walkouts and frustrated visitors and staff.
I’ve had this happen numerous times across numerous museums, especially for the ticketing and gift shops. The only solution I’ve found was to remove the staff manning those locations (which breaks up the queue) and then quickly slot them back in, hoping the damage done was minimal enough.
It is an incredibly annoying bug and I really hope that it gets addressed in the future.
While the pathfinding for the AI is much better in the build I played (no more getting stuck in queues for the toilets!), this new issue has the potential to affect a ton more people and annoy the living daylights out of them.
There’s also another annoying issue I hope to see addressed. This time, it’s not a bug.
Rather it’s an objective that pops up in too many different museums. Inevitably, a museum will force you to meet a certain threshold for Staff Happiness or Pay Satisfaction.
Needless to say, those conditions suck the life out of the game when they’re thrown into the mix. Raising Staff Happiness is bad enough but raising Pay Satisfaction can massively hurt your bottom line. For museums that are barely hanging on, hitting this requirement to progress is a death knell.
I literally had to pause the game, increase the pay for all my employees so they met the threshold. Then as soon as the requirement was met, I fired everybody. The profit margin for the in-game museums are never astronomical, even if you’re running the best museum you can at the moment. Forcing you to raise pay for your employees will decimate your profits.
It’s much more efficient to start over with a clean slate, than to keep on employees with over-inflated wages.
I have no idea who at Two Point Studios thought this would make a good requirement for gamers to meet to progress. It’s utterly insane! I actually enjoyed most of the other requirements the game placed for me to progress except for these.
Another issue I have is profit and loss accounting. It doesn’t seem to make sense. Some months I can be doing great, and then suddenly I have a loss. Of course, you can fiddle in the spreadsheets to see where you’re going wrong, but a more transparent way to see if you’re heading into the red would be much welcome.
In fact, the game hides too much of its depth behind menus.
Sectioning off your museums for your staff is a feature in the game, but it’s never mentioned unless you delve into the menus to fiddle with it. It’s a very important feature, but the zoning UI needs work. It’s a bit obtuse (the staff names and their skills are separated into two menus – one on the left and another on the right of the screen) and clunky and needs streamlining.
Pay Management is also available, yet like the zoning feature, is never mentioned if you never fool around in the menus. Without some of the museum requirements being Pay Satisfaction quotas, I’d never have known there was a way to increase all of your staffs pay with just a single button press.
Or that I can raise everybody’s pay by a percentage with a press.
All of these features should’ve been front and center, not hidden away!
The framerate too is massively improved from the preview version. It’s now much more stable, even with a ton of visitors to the museum. I had the game stutter a bit with the original Prehistoric Museum in the preview but that never really happened in the new build…at least not until the later sections when I have huge museums and massive crowds on-screen.
There is still slowdown, but you’ll have to have a massive museum for that to happen. It will happen though, especially when you use Marketing to boost visitor numbers so if you have a middling PC, make sure to turn the settings down or risk blowing up your RIG. The stuttering gets a bit annoying if you like to zoom in and out, but if you stick to a camera distance, it’s basically a non-issue.
On the ASUS ROG Ally X, the game runs beautifully…with some caveats.
1080p gameplay is possible, though you’ll want to limit the visuals to the Medium setting. You can play on High, but as soon as the museum gets busy, your FPS will go down into the gutter. Bypass that entirely with a Medium visual setting.
This still doesn’t mean a stable 60FPS, or even a stable 30FPS…but it does mean a playable experience. If you can overlook the fluctuating framerate, the game functions just fine. Make sure V-Sync is turned on, or the screen tearing will drive you made.
Do I recommend playing on the go with these conditions? Of course. Two Point Museum isn’t something that depends on reflexes so a low framerate barely detracts from the experience. Even then, it’s not like the FPS is in the single digits or low teens, so there’s really not much of an issue.
If you’ve been gaming for decades like I have (where 3D games used to have framerates in the teens), this is barely a blip in the grand scheme of things.
The Bottom Line.
Two Point Museum is fun. It might even be better than Two Point Hospital if Two Point Studios play their cards right and shore up its weaknesses with DLC expansions.
That however, is something for the future.
As it stands now, Two Point Museum is still devastatingly fun, though in severe need of fixes. The broken queue system is a massive bug that should be addressed as soon as possible.
Other issues, like the blatantly unfun Pay Satisfaction requirements also plague the game and detract from the experience.
Ask me if I would recommend the game despite knowing all this? The answer would still be yes. The game is fun (and has been fun even in its preview form) and I really look forward to see how it’ll evolve further with DLCs.
TLDR:
The core game is fun and good but that’s besieged by bugs and some one-off shallow gameplay.
The Good:
- Huge variety of museum types.
- The humor.
- Tons of exhibits to display and decorations to unlock.
- Lots of different expeditions to undertake.
The Bad:
- Buggy.
- Too many great ideas that aren’t fleshed out.
- Many specific rooms and contraptions aren’t needed in other maps.
- Decorations force you to squish exhibits.
- Some features hidden away.
Salehuddin Husin, EIC
Sal's been in the industry since the early 2000s. He's written for a ton of gaming and tech publications including Playworks, Hardwarezone, HWM and GameAxis. Recently, Sal served as a juror for the Indie Game Awards at Taipei Game Show 2020. A geek and hardcore gamer, Sal will play everything, on any platform.
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