A star rating of 4 out of 5.

When you visit a museum in real life, value for money is often a deciding factor — what’s the price of admission, and how many hours of enjoyment can you expect to receive in return for that investment?

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With Two Point Museum — the latest management simulation from Two Point Studios, the makers of Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus — that value for money factor is way off the charts. In a very good way.

Fans of those previous Two Point games, and the Theme Hospital series from back in the day, will be absolutely thrilled with the amount of entertainment on offer here.

For a price of £24.99 (or less if you shop at CD Keys), you are literally getting 10s of hours of fun here. And a lot of replayability on top of that.

One of the best things about Two Point Museum is that it just keeps going. Even if you blitz through your first major objectives in each location, you’ll be given more and more to do. You’re constantly learning new things and picking up new skills.

A screenshot from Two Point Museum, showing a dinosaur exhibit.
There's a huge amount of creativity on offer. Sega / Two Point Studios

The game starts you off in a classic version of a museum. Playing into a Natural History Museum vibe, you’ll have to collect dinosaur bones and other fossils and present them in a way that will please your guests and encourage them to make donations.

After you’ve mastered the basics of selling tickets, organising expeditions and arranging exhibits, you’ll find yourself unlocking a fish-based museum and a spooky museum full of ghosts (with a handful of other museums waiting to be unlocked after that).

The really impressive thing about this game is that it doesn’t let you off the case easily. It wants you to revisit each of these museums, multiple times, as you pick up new items and mechanics along the way. These are not 'one and done' locations.

There’s a special sort of thrill when you load up a museum you haven’t seen in a few hours, now with fresh eyes. And there’s a special sort of satisfaction that comes with driving up the rating for each museum and gradually picking up new tools.

The catch, and the reason why we can’t bring ourselves to give a perfect score in this review, is that you will uncover more glitches and error messages the more that you commit hours to this game.

The more we played, the more we encountered crashes, visual glitches and items behaving badly. Some of these were easy to ignore, while others had us hoping for future patches.

Softening the blow on that front is the fact the Two Point’s trademarked humour remains very much present and correct. It’s slightly less in your face this time, but everything from the museum exhibits to the in-game radio is laden with genuinely amusing gags.

Playing on a base PS5 console, the user interface is another struggle. The more complicated the game becomes, the more fiddly it gets to find the feature that you need at any given moment. You’ll spend a lot of time tapping around on the D-pad and trying to find the right thing.

What’s truly impressive is that this never feels like a chore that isn’t worth completing. The catchy music helps with that, too.

As each of your museums level up, you’ll feel genuinely proud of yourself. This isn’t an easy game to master, and it’s admirably deep for a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

It feels like a real achievement when you get your exhibits, your experts, your security, your marketing team and all the other interlinked systems firing on all cylinders.

Between the major museums, you’ll also be challenged to overcome short-term challenges in a series of smaller pop-up exhibits, which breaks up the monotony nicely and stops the game from feeling too much like actual work.

All in all, we’d say that Two Point Museum is well worth the price of admission. If you’re a fan of the management simulation genre, we’d recommend that you buy your ticket today. You won’t regret it!

Two Point Museum launches Tuesday 4th March, with early access available now if you pre-order the Explorer Edition.

The game is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. We reviewed on PS5.

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Authors

Rob Leane Gaming Editor
Rob LeaneGaming Editor

Rob Leane is the Gaming Editor at Radio Times, overseeing our coverage of the biggest games on PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, PC, mobile and VR. Rob works across our website, social media accounts and video channels, as well as producing our weekly gaming newsletter. He has previously worked at Den of Geek, Stealth Optional and Dennis Publishing.

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