Summary
Two Point Museum is a management-simulation game that involves curating exhibits, building the layout, and hiring staff. I have been playing it at launch, and I thoroughly enjoyed it with an optimized portable experience on my Switch 2. Things become a bit repetitive, or the challenge isn’t as strong as one might expect. As for the performance, not only is it kept at 30 fps on Switch 2, but it’s not all that stable. The title misses the highlighted Mouse features of Switch 2, which is definitely a bummer. There are multiple museum locations/themes, and a sandbox mode for creative freedom. It is A fun, creative, and deep enough to keep you engaged.
Developer- Two Point Studios
Publisher- Sega, SEGA of America
Platforms- Nintendo Switch 2 (Reviewed) PC, PS5, Xbox
Review copy given by the Publisher.
It’s been too many decades to count since Theme Hospital was released, but the team at Two Point Studios has continued the trend of management sims in a direction that makes more sense to me: the museum. There’s quite a bit to the game that you may not expect. Different themes and scenarios, tours, going out on expeditions, and the inevitable Nintendo Switch 2 performance.
Is the Two Point Museum on Nintendo Switch 2 an attraction you’re going to want to visit, or might you be asking for your money back? I feel that the series as a whole has never really focused heavily on narrative. Instead, opting to plonk you in the role of a manager of a hospital, the dean of a campus, or, in this case, the curator of a museum.
So, that’s what you do. The first museum you’re handed, and I do say handed because it’s really up and running by the time you gain control, centers on the theme of prehistory. There are dinosaur bones, fossils, but things feel very familiar if you’ve played any Two Point or theme game in the past. But here, it’s all about exhibits, placing them down, and decorating them to increase their overall appeal. This then generates what’s called buzz.
I’m sure you can guess what that is. The more buzzing everyone is, well, the happier they are, and the better reviews they’ll give you by the time they eventually leave. Now, things do get much more interesting because with all of these games, I like to shoehorn my guests in a certain way. Here, you’re given things like one-way doors so that you can do exactly that.
Guide them around the way that you want them to go so that they see absolutely everything. And why might I want to do that? Well, I have scattered my museums with a ton of donation parts. This is only to increase my amount of bunts, make a ton of wedge, and then reinvest it into the museum itself by hiring a bunch of new staff. You can put out job advertisements as well, so that you can find a staff member who is proficient in a particular museum theme.
Other ones include space, marine life, and the supernatural. But to gain your exhibits, you’re going to have to send certain staff members out on exhibitions. This quite intrigued me, as I thought it was a cool idea. Sometimes you’ll need to make specific items for them in the workshop so that they can gain advantages in some location.
So, if you want to catch a big fish, you’re going to need to make a big net, which will have to be researched and created. When they go out, you can choose whether to go really quickly, but at the cost of potentially being more dangerous, standard, or a detailed exhibition.
I’m sure this will gain you more rewards, but it takes much longer. On the subject of time, you can pause whenever you want by clicking the right stick, and also speed it up if you’d rather progress more quickly. Museum is a very tutorial game, rich or heavy depending on how you look at it. It really guides you through almost every mechanic until you get to the further museums. I think this is where you’re just let loose, and you can go a bit more off the rails when it comes to creativity.
It’s not just about spamming the museum with absolutely anything that you want to fill it with. As theme cohesion plays into its rating when you start to do things like take tours around it. If you jump from the giant fossil to the ice cube, prehistoric man, that tour is going to be rubbish. If it’s too long, they’re going to get bored. So, there is a nice little balancing act that takes place there. Other challenges that are dropped into your lap are things like school
trips, flooding your museum with excitable sprogs that want to touch every exhibit. It means you’re going to have to have more professionals on the ground to try and clean up the mess they make, but also keep them happy. This is because these special events can net you some serious rewards.
My expectations of the game were that it would have a mouse mode. It would have some form of touchscreen. Certainly, one of those elements, even if they’re not something that you enjoy, you’d hope to see it. We don’t see touchscreen and mouse mode. It’s a missed opportunity in my opinion, having those there, especially when the game’s already on PC, so it supports mouse. But the control method they’ve gone for it’s easy enough. You pan with the right stick, move, and place with the left. You can zoom in and out with triggers and select items.
For me, the thing with the latest Two Point games it’s not necessarily that they’re not enjoyable, because I really do like the setup. I think it’s that after the Hospital, they’ve struggled to recreate the kind of demands that it places on the player. When you had someone come in with a bloaty head and you had to make a machine specifically to cure that ailment, or you had to go away and research those more advanced conditions.
Then stay on top of pandemics and things that took place, which generates a certain amount of excitement. With a museum, you don’t have quite the same feeling of pressure for one of a better word. In fact, you rarely consider individual guests. The only real consideration is how they are rating you. You can see that by a symbol above their head when they leave at times, but major things like not having a toilet or getting stuck. It doesn’t really focus on that granular level of management. Now, you can put the prices up on stalls, tweak the wages and salaries of your staff, and you can even train them.
You also receive some special items that you have to showcase within your museum to try and generate more buzz. If you do so, you gain some rewards. But I didn’t feel quite as compelled to do these things as I may have done. Now, I think the different themes were a really clever idea, though, because you essentially have multiple different museums on the go at any one time. You can move between them to increase their overall rankings, and it keeps it feeling fresh.
So, you could jump from your prehistory over to your marine life, then to your mish-mash, expanding as well to new areas and plots. Don’t get me wrong, they’re very fun games, particularly by the end, there is a feeling of some grinding just to reach those arbitrary star rankings. Still, they are enjoyable and pretty addictive, it has to be said.
These games run in Unity. Over on Xbox and PlayStation, I’ve seen 60 frames per second with some drops. On Switch, I have a 30 frames per target with some drops. As the museum gets larger, you will see performance take a hit. Now, it’s never terrible, and in a strategy game, it’s not the priority, or it’s not the major concern. I should say that it is in some experiences. But I still think that 25 to 27 FPS is not ideal.
The 3D models look reasonable, but the bigger you get, the more you will see the hit to performance and some stuttering. The sound and audio are the hallmarks of the series when it comes to things like the radio and the announcer talking, basically, to the player is a really clever idea. Instead of having those constant tutorial prompts, it will say something like, “Guests are reminded that if they cannot find a place to donate, they should look harder, or we should add one.”
Visuals and performance combined, they score 12 out of 20. Sound and audio scores 17 out of 20. One area the Museum gets spot on is the value.
