Two Point Museum: Zooseum review — Who let the toads out?

Two Point Museum has been a favourite of mine all year, and I find myself chomping at the bit to get more. The game has been kept fresh by little content updates, new zones to explore, and its first DLC pack. We reviewed that one, so be sure to check it out: Two Point Museum: Fantasy Finds. For this DLC, Olivia and I are back, and boy, did we have our work cut out for us. Zooseum is packed with content and mechanics that the game does a very good job of rewarding you for participating in.

Two Point Museum has been delight after delight with a stellar base game that we gave a near-perfect score and a first round of DLC that fuelled my excitement for the potential this game had in additional themed museums. Fantasy Finds was a strong first dip with some space for improvement. However, Zooseum truly had me gobsmacked as I had been wishing for Two Point Zoo for a while. The fact that it’s DLC for TP Museum is a bit of a let down and I think this DLC could only work if it went all out as a fully fledged museum that matched the scale of the base game ones. After messing around with its wildlife and zookeeper life, I can happily say this DLC fulfilled my dreams and more.     

Let’s Dive In              

Before you dive into Zooseum, be ready for a lot of mechanics. They’re not as involved as Fantasy Finds, and I thought they were more rewarding. This time, the mechanics are introduced more cohesively with a much better pace. I never felt like I was being forced to rush through this two-star museum.

To start with, each animal will need a habitat. The bigger habitats are built like you would build a Room, whereas the smaller habitats, the terrariums, are built at the Workshop. Both are relatively customizable, but be careful because the animals can be pretty picky with what they want you to add to their enclosure. You also have to be careful about which animals you put together because some of the hunters will eat the herbivores. It’s just like how it works with fish, except this is much cooler and way more entertaining. I was worried that habitats would act more like the ghost residences in Wailon Lodge, which, after getting many of them, became a bother to manage as ghosts were regularly losing their sanity and running rampant in the museum. No matter how many experts I had, there was always some kind of trouble going on. Luckily, as Raven says, habitats are much more like their aquarium counterparts, which were much easier to maintain. I never encountered problems with unhappy animals and never had one die on me, so the gameplay felt balanced. 

There are a couple of ways to build your habitats, but I prefer to make some rectangles and call it a day. When I found an animal that could be housed with another, I expanded that habitat and returned to working inside the museum itself. I keep all of my habitats outside so I can fool around in the museum as a whole. A big complaint I had about this space is how much of the map is dedicated to a tennis court and such, and while there is plenty of space to build at this point in the game, I just want a bigger map with as little side content as possible. Zooseum really needed a large map, as the player is given a multitude of animals to display, and habitats can take up a lot of room. I wanted to make sprawling lion habitats, but after entering the late game, I found myself squeezed for space while also keeping in mind the usual amenities my museum needed.

The overall customization for this museum is the amount you usually get for all museums, so you’ll find that early in the DLC, you don’t have much to use to make your museum look wild and nature-infested. You’ll have to slowly build it up through unlockables and research points. A neat idea to bulk up early on, however, is to use the decor from the dinosaur museum. The museum category has a lot of leaves, trees, and rocks you can use to complement the Zooseum DLC if you feel a bit uninspired. 

One of my favourite aspects of the customization in Zooseum, however, is the new workshop projects. In every museum, you’ll get unique themed attractions like a seance simulator in Wailon Lodge and a Seahorse racing game in Passwater Cove. In Zooseum, instead of aiming for two large projects like every other museum, they create a sort of animal-themed playground set with a snake slide and a gazelle spring ride. After customizing 5+ museums, it's nice to have some variety in how I make a new one. I loved making a playground area for kids in Silverbottom Park. 

This time around, you’ll be spending a lot of time in the staff facilities as Zooseum relies heavily on workshop projects, training staff, healing animals, and researching animals. This more hands-on approach to staff feels a lot like Bungle Wasteland, but isn’t so convoluted as building project after project; there’s variety to what you do here. The most noticeable change to how you normally run a museum is that you won’t be using a Deconstructor to gain research points for your exhibits. Instead, you’ll need to train certain staff in Animal Analysis, where they’ll be able to gain Knowledge from Wildlife Welfare treatment—this is when you first get an animal from an expedition, and they’re often plagued with Farflung Flu. Therefore, it’s important to get a grasp of this new approach sooner rather than later if you want to get unlockable content from the research tree faster. You’ll also be able to train staff in macro and micro zoology, but this just boosts restoration speeds. It seems like Zooseum is guiding players to organize their museum around training rather than chucking random qualifications on random staff. This is where I found the assigned section and action tabs to come in handy as I made sure specifically trained staff were only working in specific areas.

Another cool new gameplay feature is the ability to get animals you’ve already found without the expense and reliance on luck of doing the same expedition. Once you’ve found a new animal, you’ll be able to access the conservation tab, where you can spend points to adopt another. They’ll be random, so if you want a specific gender, you may have to wait for it to refresh. These points are accumulated through re-releasing animals back into the wild. At the start of the campaign, they’ll also give you some free ones to test the system. Overall, I liked this inclusion, as in every museum I play, when I'm trying to get exhibits I haven't found, I'll always end up with duplicates that will either be converted into Knowledge or sold. As this new museum has a different approach to Knowledge, the conservation system acts complementary and helped me in bulking up habitats, so I could then breed animals and, in turn, bulk up my museum. 

The animals themselves have some unique perks that you’ll have to consider if you are mixing and matching species in one space. A lot of the personality traits are unique to animals in Zooseum, with some like a Bull Frog having an Insecta diet, a Carnivulture being a regular pooper, and a Zig-Zebra increasing the energy of guests. They even tie into breeding with certain animals having specific traits, like Mother Hen, which increases the health of offspring in the enclosure. The devs really seemed to have had fun with creating their different animals, making them unique to play with in every habitat. It's not supposed to have a heavy bearing on how you play with them, but it's a little something to keep in mind when planning habitats. Another fun aspect the animals have is that they all have a favourite wildlife expert. Once they’ve been in your museum for a while, they’ll choose an expert they gel with, and then whenever they come into the habitat to refill food or clean, the animal will get a boost of happiness. Again, a minor and inconsequential feature, but so cute all the same!

Final Thoughts 

Two Point Museum: Zooesum is a worthwhile addition to the base game. This DLC, combined with everything else in the main game, makes Two Point: Museum feel like the game is living, breathing, and growing through time. I like the design of most of the animals a lot. Don’t get me wrong, some are butt ugly and a little freaky looking, but I enjoy it all the same. I didn’t love the amount of space everything in this DLC takes up, though. The facilities especially felt like they were really pushing it. To me, they nailed the conservation aspect.