A third dose of Two Point goodness has arrived! After stints in hospitals and universities, the Two Point series has arrived to spread its brand of light-hearted management and mischief to the hallowed exhibition halls of museums. Does this third outing put on an impressive display, or shouldn’t this fossil have been excavated?
If you’re looking for a complex management sim with many finnicky intricacies, the Two Point games aren’t for you. For everybody else though, their simple and accessible charms are a breath of fresh air, energized as they are by a surprising knack for humour and quirkiness. Two Point Museum continues this trend and it’s a pleasant and easy-going game that’ll delight fans and caress the curiosities of newcomers, although it does admittedly seem like a case of “same game different set dressing” at times.
Your main job in Two Point Museum is to build a museum attraction on bare land, and utilize all the tools and options at your disposal to make it look attractive to customers and generate buzz. Not to fret, this buzz isn’t a swarm of bees, but rather it’s a fresh new method to gauge customer excitement and anticipation for what’s to come in the museum, so that you can garner their desires to leave good reviews and return in the future. Like in previous Two Point games your job is to make a profit and to stay about from the red and (if you can) stay away from loans unless absolutely essential to save your museum from flopping like the critical reception for the Night of the Museum films according to Rotten Tomatoes.
There are many features both subtle and significant that allow Two Point Museum to stand out. Objects, facilities and personnel tend to be unique to the museum setting like donation stalls that can be used by customers to help keep the museum alive, information boards giving you details about each and every exhibit you plonk down, and there are experts you can hire who can be trained in various forms of research that can help you build and maintain structures or take on unique expeditions.
What kind of expeditions can you be exposed to across The Bone Belt? You’ve got fossil-based showcases, space-based jaunts, aquariums, spooky layouts that may jump out at you in the supernatural wing, and plant-based museums that celebrated everything botany. Plenty of hijinx await at each type of museum, but all of them are fascinating, though you might yearn for more types once you’ve seen them all.
You might believe that Two Point Museum‘s existence as a management sim will mean there’s plenty of busywork with little reward, but this definitely isn’t true. If you pay attention and understand the nooks and crannies of cultivating a blooming museum, then the pleasures of seeing it thrive are plentiful. In addition, the sense of humor of the Two Point series is very well placed, so cheeriness offsets any feelings of grind or hassle. There’s always room for some clowning around in these games, and witnessing funny moments in part of the pleasure in Two Point Museum, which is something other management sims tend to miss by focusing on the hard work to keep businesses running smoothly.
If you build up a museum, you’ll be helping yourself and the museum by decorating it with as much tat as possible. You’ll want the museum to look ravishing because every piece of decor you apply will add to the museum’s attractiveness on top of the mandatory amenities. Don’t mind dotting benches around like acne on a teenager’s face, and don’t be afraid of flowering offices with plants and posters with the eagerness of a granny giving you multiple pecks on the cheek. Fiddling around with your museum’s interior space is rewarded rather than punished because abundance is wealth, not just in real life, but in the ordeals of running a fictional museum in a videogame!
Like in previous Two Point games, every structure serves an important purpose that’ll keep people coming back for more. You’ll want to build gift shops, restaurants, amusement areas to keep children happy, and like in previous games you’ll want to make sure you’ve got toilets, staff rooms and training areas covered to keep guests and employees chirpy. You can increase employee pay or give them regular breaks if they’re threatening to leave, but be careful you don’t begin an exodus, you’ve got to keep your employees as happy as the customers, so do what you have to by fiddling with the micromanaging sliders in the menu to keep everything balanced.
On the subject of expeditions, this significant new feature to the Two Point series allows players to pick field experts and other employees, and send them off in a helicopter to far-off locations to retrieve artefacts and displays for the exhibits, which are brought back in giant wooden crates. Sometimes these crates don’t house new showpieces, but XP to spend however you like, but no matter what these crates may contain, it’ll be ample and worth your time investing in expeditions. You’ll open up more locations the more objectives you complete and the better levelled-up your personnel is, so the evolution of your museum can continue to thrive.
Expeditions open up the Two Point experience in a way that wasn’t possible in the previous two games. Sure, you can’t go and find these displays for yourself by hunting for them in some surprising sub-game, but bringing back the precious and expensive showpiece from far-out locations gives you the sense that your museum is a global entity, and by extension it makes the Two Point series feel bigger because your product is bought by branching out from the destination of your own land.
There’s no museum or any business without persistent upkeep. Assistants help you constantly by taking the helm behind help desks and gift shops to help customers buy tickets and goods. Security is specifically required in Two Point Museum due to pesky thieves who attempt to steal, and vandals who attempt to break and besmirch exhibits. Accumulating knowledge is continuously important so that new exhibits can be given proper fact-checking. There’s no point in the field experts venturing out to collect a crate with a giant sculpture inside of it, but know nothing about it and putting nothing on the information boards. Insights create buzz too, so keep that trundling along and educating everybody will bear fruit in the form of positive reviews and ultimately, more money.
Another significant difference from Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus is that there’s no longer a maximum 3 star level for your museum, meaning you can complete more objectives and are encouraged to continuously expand each museum you build and maintain. This makes Two Point Museum feel limitless, throwing out the sense you’ve done everything and need to move on to advance.
Despite the lack of anything exceptionally ground-breaking in Two Point Museum, it’s difficult not to fully appreciate the art style and the insatiable quirks you’ll behold throughout. Every customer and employee is designed with a goofy Wallace & Gromit-like appearance, especially those scheming kiddies who’ll soon bite chunks out of these expensive master works and priceless curations. The most menacing though is that the excitable presentation belies mischief and sneakiness that’s both adorable and highly suspect.
Sound design pops in a fashion that emphasizes the arcade-like and accessible ease of the Two Point world. It all seems so jolly and plucky that the music and the positivity hides more challenging characteristics like getting to grips with running a full-fledged museum! The narration is delightful and doesn’t stop flowing with punchy puns and playful remarks, but at the same time the assistance you receive from the proprietor is invaluable and his gentle voice and helpful demeanour will give the new and timid players a welcoming personality to learn from.
Conclusion
Much in the same way as the previous two Two Point entries, Two Point Museum is a delightful and cheeky, yet deliciously approachable management sim that’s top of the class when it comes to comedy, irreverence and accessibility. While Two Point Museum continues the series momentum rather the delving into something entirely unexpected, it still contains many subtle and not-so-subtle new features that improve the entire Two Point franchise. The variety of exhibits, the discoveries and treasures you can uncover from undertaking expeditions, as well as items, structures, personnel, and children, keep Two Point Museum plodding along as an entry that fascinates as memorably as attending a real museum. Although you’re continuously extinguishing the problems of running a successful gallery of grand exhibitions, you’re rewarded with unlimited progression, and you can move along at a pace that serves you more than ever before. Now that’s the third great Two Point experience in a row to savour. Undoubtedly, Two Point Museum is a Jurassic success.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
