I have a love/hate relationship with this whole franchise of games, honestly, and this one probably tilts closer to hate for me - some of it is smoother than Two Point Hospital (probably my favourite of the three) and that's nice, and when it's fun and things are going well, it's very nice, but when it's bad it's god awful.
There are a ton of irritations and poorly designed aspects of the gameplay and the management systems that often add up into one big headache, and it really makes me hesitate to say I even like the game, let alone recommend it to someone who actually wants a solid sim-management experience. It might be ok for someone who just wants a casual museum-building experience and doesn't care about exploring the game's potential depths or meeting the career objectives, but for someone who does want to explore the game's depths and enjoys the structure that career mode gives, beware of the many frustrating trade-offs.
In a game like this, I usually like to play career mode first before getting into sandbox so that I can learn the ins and outs of the game with some guidance, but I'm starting to wonder if it's worth the slog and the hassle - and I mean HASSLE. The constant pop-ups and notifications, even after I've chosen 'Hide all' in the advisor filter option in the settings, are getting damn near unbearable. The game is CONSTANTLY throwing information at you in a really chaotic way, to the point where I wonder how anyone's supposed to find it relaxing??? It's like the devs think you need your hand held for every tiny little thing, but then they focus on the most obvious, surface-level stuff, overloading you with way too much information, including stuff that isn't even very relevant to the gameplay, but when it comes to even slightly more in-depth things, for example, marking out zones and assigning them to security guards, it leaves you in the dark. Lots of actually important things are left unclear or how they work just doesn't make sense or is inconsistent with how the rest of the game works (or in some cases, how games work in general - like using BLUE instead of GREEN to mark that a tour route is a good one????? Maybe this was supposed to be an accommodation for colourblind people or something, but in that case maybe you should have just used something like ticks and crosses instead or as well as, and made them stronger or more faded depending on how good the route is!), and instead of just giving you time to breathe between tasks and figure things out, the game is constantly trying to grab your attention away from whatever task you're currently doing, or it makes it way too easy to accidentally click out of the current menu/info box you're reading and interrupt the whole process.
I also really hate the stickers notifications that you get for doing basically anything at all that you were told to do - they're so pointless and annoying. I could not care less, but they're always popping up, and if you have the exhibits tab minimised to save space on the screen, the ever-present red dot makes it look like you might have something important that you missed, like a new functional item for expeditions in your inventory, so I'm forever clicking to expand the tab, only to find it's three new stickers that don't mean anything and don't add anything whatsoever to the game experience, except maybe more of my soul dying off.
Sometimes it feels like deep down this game wants you to fail, by hovering over your every move like a twitchy helicopter parent who's supposedly "well-intentioned" but is actually trying to control you by micromanaging the most minor crap, keeps pulling you away from the fun you could be having and gives you none of the freedom or tools you actually need to succeed.
Clearly, I have a lot to get off my chest with this game, but I'll end it here - this could be a great museum management game if it wasn't so overstuffed with shallow things and poorly designed in so many areas. If the option of a better-designed museum building/management game came out, I'd gladly stop playing Two Point Museum and get the other one instead. For now, it scratches an itch, just barely, but I'll probably limit my playing to small doses.
