Zooseum is the second DLC expansion to last year’s excellent management sim, Two Point Museum. As with the previous DLC, Zooseum adds an all-new Zoo theme: wildlife! The DLC adds new expert types, new rooms, a new expedition map, and lots and lots of funny animals to find, house, and breed. The wildlife animals are a welcome addition thanks to Two Point Museum’s intuitive and well-designed management tools, and mostly stress-free animals.
Check our our review of the base game, Two Point Museum, and the first DLC, Fantasy Finds!
Lions and Tigers and Pandas
Unlike the first DLC, which released a new map as a free update, Zooseum properly includes its own 5-star campaign map in Silverbottom Park. The map itself isn’t anything exciting; it mostly resembles the first map of the base game, Memento Mile, though I do start out with a forever-free janitor and Wildlife Expert.
The Wildlife Experts are the new experts that handle wildlife animals. Wildlife comes in two major categories: larger animals that must be housed in habitat rooms, and smaller animals that fit inside terrariums.
Terrariums are constructed at the Workshop and come in three different sizes. Once placed, I can easily swap to whichever biome is required for the critters I’m looking to drop in there. Many animals can share the same space, though just as with the aquatic fish, predators can and will eat others, and need to be separated.
Larger animals, such as tigers, capybaras, and tortoises, must be housed in habitats, which are built like rooms. Habitats must be at least 5×5, but otherwise can be as big as I want, and larger habitats can fit more animals (just like aquariums). And just like terrariums, habitats can be swapped to different biomes at the touch of button, and then decorated with various biome-themed objects (mostly plants).
Taking a queue from the ghosts and poltergeist rooms, different animals prefer different objects and density levels of their habitats, making it tricky to house different species together. However, soon after unlocking a few new POIs on the new map and building out our Wildlife zoo, we unlock the ability to breed animals.
Jungle Love
Breeding animals is a major part of the new expansion, and ultimately makes the Wildlife theme one of the easiest museum themes to succeed with. By placing a breeding shed in a habitat (or terrarium) with at least one male and female animal of the same species, we let nature take its course, provided there’s room for more. Not only do offspring give our museum additional buzz, but we can also release grown adults into the wild, earning sanctuary points (for species adoptions) and increasing the biodiversity of their POI, resulting in higher-quality animals coming in.
New offspring can quickly populate, causing habitats to become much dirtier much faster, and even wipe out an entire habitat, as happened to my poor tigers. Thankfully the same trick that worked on dying fish — picking them up into our inventory, cleaning the environment, then placing them back, works equally well here.
The new expedition map also feels far easier than others, requiring only high-levels of staff, plus the Wildlife specific traits of Macro and Micro-Zoology. I was able to achieve 5-stars (and almost as quickly, 6 stars) on Silverbottom Park without ever exploring the top or bottom regions of the expedition map.
Granted, I also have dozens of hours of Two Point Museum knowledge to guide me!
Another interesting wrinkle is knowledge and enlightenment. Wildlife animals can’t be deconstructed in an analysis room (although fish totally could). Instead, we give them cute little baths in our spas, which is part of our animal welfare room. Since we don’t lose the animal in the process, it’s incredibly easy to unlock everything in the enlightenment section, and maximize the knowledge of every new species that arrives.
New animals will occasionally arrive with the Farflung Flu, needing a quick visit to the welfare room for restoration. But afterwards, there’s no chance of disease, sickness, or much of any upkeep whatsoever beyond keeping the habitats clean, and food dispensers full. It’s much easier to manage than its older and more demanding cousin, Planet Zoo.
Two Point Museum: Zooseum successfully builds upon the aquatics and ghostly themes of the base game for another well-integrated museum theme — alongside a proper campaign map, while losing none of the trademark humor and ease-of-play that we love from this series.
Two Point Museum is available on PC (Steam, Epic), PlayStation 5, Switch 2, and Xbox Series X/S. It’s rated E for Everyone.
