Two Point Museum‘s latest downloadable content expansion, Zooseum, is a very neat excuse to revisit the museum management game and introduce a dose of fresh gameplay. While the game already included wildlife-focused museums – notably, an aquarium that allowed you to gather and display fish – Zooseum takes that concept one step further, adding zoo simulator-like elements.
As you explore a new museum with a five-star campaign attached, you’ll be required to rescue and re-home a variety of strange and funny-looking animals across new expedition locations, using new tools and habitats to ensure their prosperity.
Two Point Museum’s Zooseum review – quick links
Two Point Museum’s Zooseum DLC is perfectly fun and funny
Zooseum, like the rest of Two Point Museum, brims with good humour. Setting off on expedition, it’s a delight to discover creatures like the Cabin Snail, which has a tiny home on its back, and the Fountain Lion, which is half lion, half fish.
Each creature is inspired by a pun or fun wordplay, and you’ll want to uncover them all – if only to see how silly the game gets, and to watch your long-necked giraffe whipping back and forth, Silentó style.
Rather than being a simple process, collection and display mechanics are fairly layered, in ways that are satisfying to parse. First, you must consider your array of experts and their skills. Then, you need to figure out which expeditions are viable and which creatures you’re planning to pursue (all of which can be ticked off in a sticker book).
Then, it’s a matter of planning your space, selecting your habitat or terrarium types, and ensuring your new animals get the best care and buzz possible.
Some need curing of a wild disease before they’re put on display. Some love to be renamed, for added buzz. Others have specific desires about their roomies – they might want to be with their own kind, or with compatible friends.
What follows is a Tetris puzzle of figuring out how many terrariums and habitats you need, where to put each animal, and how to display them in a way that satisfies all your guests, while also allowing your museum to grow.
Goal posts are reasonable, as is money generation
Zooseum‘s home museum is thankfully well-geared for this. It’s not too easy to create a thriving museum space – you’ll still need to pace yourself and ensure you leave space and time for new developments without blowing your budget – but this particular museum has fair and measured goals, unlike others in the base game.
In the later stages of Two Point Museum, there are a number of museums that require lots of planning for success, with any missteps immediately leading to your sales and donations tanking, requiring harsh loans with high repayments.
The goals in Zooseum feel very achievable, with each naturally leading into the next starred goal. While this stage can feel a bit hand-holdy at times, this allows you to grasp the new mechanics early on, and then ignore the hand holds while you create and decorate as you wish.
A satisfying next chapter for Two Point Museum
The further you advance, the more new features and items you’ll unlock – from smaller terrariums to larger ones, where you can allow your snail colonies to live in harmony.
If you want to create the best Zooseum possible, you’ll also need to consider backtracking. Re-wilding allows you to gather Sanctuary Points, which then let you adopt doubles of animals you’ve already collected, ensuring the perfect buzz.
Playing with all of these systems allows you to create a lush, functional zoo within the bounds of Two Point Museum, with lovely animation and colourful critters adding a cosy, comforting vibe to the game.
Should Two Point Studios be looking for its next avenue, the lightness and simple beauty of this animal-filled expansion could certainly serve as future inspiration for a spin-off. While the Zooseum DLC lacks complexity overall, there’s a real charm in how it introduces animals to the museum space, and good humour papers over the rest.
A PC code for Two Point Museum: Zooseum was supplied by the publisher for the purposes of this review.
