Two Point Museum Review (Kunovega)
More innovative than you might expect.
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If you're coming into this from Two Point Hospital or Campus you may be expecting more of the same, but this manages to go in a slightly different direction while maintaining the same overall world and aesthetic themes.
With Two Point hospital you had the challenges of trying to heal patients with silly diseases and the challenge comes from managing emergencies and struggling with early budget restrictions before finally building up a hospital to the point of being self sustaining and then moving on to the next. There's some building and decorating elements, but the core of the game was patient management.
Two Point Campus dropped the difficulty and focused on managing student education. What few challenges you faced were in the planning stages during the summer and then you pretty much watched a fish bowl play itself out through the school year before deciding how to expand further. There's some fun in the management and planning stages, but it lacked the difficulty or urgency present in Hospital. Decorating and expanding the buildings became your diversion and fun during the long wait periods between seasonal changes to course management.
Two Point Museum takes a different approach. You don't have patient needs to meet. You don't have students paying you for an education. Instead the entire focal point is "decorate" and impress visitors on a grand scale. The building and decorating elements in this aren't just a diversion you do along side your main job, it is the main job.
If you enjoyed the building and decorating elements of the previous two, this will probably be an enjoyable game for you.
To keep some level of challenge and gameplay variety there's the introduction of expeditions. You have to hire staff and send teams out into the world on a variety of trips to find new exhibits. Those exhibits attract more visitors and impress visitors based on how well you display them and arrange decorative elements around them.
The ability to fully alter the building size is back (introduced in Campus) and expanded on further by letting you place your own interior walls (even angled) and customize the exhibit spaces into your own hall or room shapes.
Management of the museums and expeditions is even more of a non-linear design. In both prior games, while you could technically revisit previous hospitals and campus you were more or less expected to just keep moving on to the next one after completing them. In this your career is more interconnected. You'll unlock a new museum but still need to return to prior ones to complete new tasks and continue research into your exhibits and their history. Your exploring of new sites continues to unlock more things you can display, so you'll eventually be juggling an empire of displays across multiple museums.
So far it's a fresh take on what could have easily become a stale formula.
To compare difficulty, Hospital is still the hardest of the three. Campus is the easiest and Museum comes down right in the middle, but still leaning towards being pretty easy. It's a relaxing game of exploring and decorating and "doing something wrong" isn't game ending, it just means taking longer to complete your next set of goals.
Active decisions arise from student trips showing up in groups and your responses to emergency decisions during expeditions that can alter the outcomes, etc.
There's still management elements, but it's much more about managing the buildings and how you design them while trying to find new and unusual things to put on display. And less about managing people as you don't have any patients to save or students to teach. It's just you and your staff trying to build something fun and interesting while coaxing the cash out of your visitors pockets by impressing them enough to donate.
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Bottom Line: Two Point Building Designer ~ Museum Edition
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