Played on Xbox Series S
At Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus, the appearance of our hospitals and universities didn’t matter much. We hired staff, built offices for them, constructed operating rooms and classrooms, primarily with numbers in mind. Are the doctors, whose mood affects the health of their patients, feeling well? Do the students, whose performance affects the reputation of the institution, want to hang around at the university? At Two Point Museum, the concept remains similar: we still transform large, empty spaces into lively spaces, but there is more room for self-expression. Running a museum is not only about efficiency and statistics, but also about creating interiors that you want to look at yourself.
⇡#This belongs in a museum!
The first museum you gain access to is dedicated to prehistoric finds. There, the player is introduced to the basic mechanics, including the buzz and knowledge stats that each exhibit has. Let’s say you put up a fossil with a huge footprint — it might catch someone’s attention, but it’s unlikely to leave a lasting impression. Add an information board next to the fossil — and the visitor can learn something about it. Place decorations in the same style around it — and the exhibit begins to sparkle with new colors. The more decor, the better (within restrictions, of course), and some exhibits get bonus buzz points if there is a particular object next to them.
Partially assembled dinosaur skeletons can be displayed in a museum – even in this form they can be of interest to the public
Then the standard routine for the series begins: you buy a box office to sell tickets, hire a cashier, and at the same time a security guard, a cleaner and an assistant who will monitor the exhibits and tidy them up – if they look bad, visitors will not want to leave tips, and this is almost the main source of income. You place a rest room for the staff, build a souvenir shop, and then, seeing the signs above the heads of museum guests, you remember that you forgot to put out toilets, snack machines and trash cans.
Initially, the player is given a couple of exhibits for free, but such a museum will not earn much money – you need to look for new ones somewhere. The main feature of the Two Point Museum is told quite quickly: soon we are offered people from the staff who will get into a helicopter and go on an expedition for a couple of game days. It is there that you will be able to get fossils, skeletons, exotic plants and many other curiosities – depending on which museum you are developing.
The exhibits attract a variety of audiences – for example, scuba divers come to see the marine wonders
There is a location in an abandoned building next to a cemetery, where you collect creepy toys and catch poltergeists, which visitors watch through the glass. There is a coastal museum with aquariums for unique fish. There are only five museums – it seems that this is not enough compared to eleven universities in Two Point Campus, but you do not feel a lack of content. The campaign (as always, plotless) is structured differently – here you will regularly need to return to visited locations to improve them, unlock new features and earn higher grades. I liked this approach more than moving from one building to another in Two Point Campus, where after receiving the first star out of three, you abandoned this “university” and moved on to the next, forgetting about the previous one.
But let’s get back to expeditions. Each museum has a separate schematic map, where there is a starting point, and then there are numerous branches, to open which you need to fulfill the conditions: hire a certain specialist or send an existing one to get a certain qualification; place an exhibit with the specified characteristics in the museum; reach the required level in researching a topic – for this you have to sacrifice exhibits, so it is better to use duplicates. The more often you send workers to the same place, the better it is studied, and over time, instead of ordinary artifacts or creatures, you find their amazing rare versions, which will make the museum more attractive.
Each expedition has a large description, including the price and possible rewards.
But it is important to remember that the more valuable the finds, the more dangerous the expedition may be. During the exploration, your characters will encounter random events that can have both a positive and a negative effect. In the worst case, workers may even die – it would be a shame to lose a specialist who has been working at the museum for a long time, has reached a high level and had valuable passive bonuses such as accelerated research or modest salary requests. However, deaths are rare – more often, employees simply get injured due to a snake bite, damage to the submarine hull and other troubles. In this case, the characters need to either rest in a special room in the museum, or spend time flying to another location where they will be put on their feet.
⇡#Taking care of accounting
Expeditions are a kind of game within a game, closely related to the arrangement of the museum, since the same people who work for you go on them. Hiring individual employees for forays is not very profitable, at least in the first hours, since they need to be paid the same salary as the rest. Therefore, you try not to inflate the staff and nurture jacks of all trades, and also not to overload the museum with too many ordinary exhibits. If there are a lot of objects that an assistant must look after, then his long absences on expeditions can be fatal for the quarterly profit report. And some expeditions are also very expensive, so you think twice about their profitability.
Why look at fish through glass when you can go into the aquarium?
Because of this innovation, I used time acceleration much less often than in previous Two Points, and paused the process more often. As the campaign progresses, more and more opportunities open up, and you need to monitor not only the quality of the exhibits. You buy entertainment (sort of rides) for children – they are bored reading descriptions on the stands, but they are always happy to have fun. You lay out routes for excursion tours – for this it is desirable to have the highest quality exhibits available, because not everyone is interested in looking at simple objects, and they will not pay much for this. You hang cameras to catch thieves trying to steal valuables – but you should not overdo it, otherwise visitors will feel uncomfortable due to ubiquitous surveillance. And over time, you begin to find exhibits that require special care – for example, you need to put a humidifier or a heater next to them, otherwise they will fall apart over time. And some… Okay, that’s a spoiler – there are plenty of funny surprises here.
The Two Point series has always been very exciting – these are the games that you play in the morning for a couple of hours, and after these “couple of hours” it’s suddenly deep night. In Museum, the formula has been brought almost to perfection, so that the inner perfectionist simultaneously tries to please himself with certain decisions and make museum visitors happy. For example, when you find a part of a dinosaur skeleton, it is difficult to say why you immediately send the next expedition to the same place – to get a high-quality exhibit that will bring more money, or because you yourself want to finish what you started and please the eye with this object. Or when you collect fish for a water museum – you can fill the aquarium with the first fish you come across (for example, copies of a clown fish – this is literally a fish with a clown nose), but you are drawn to collect a unique collection.
Ghosts are quite capricious, but it is not difficult to calm them down.
As before, the game provides enough opportunities to create your ideal museum. For various achievements you get the kudosh currency, and for these “kudoshi” you buy new cosmetic items – from universal to exclusive for certain rooms. Plus in Museum you can change the design of many rooms, pasting wallpaper of various colors and laying a different floor. And also, since we decorate museums, there are unique objects like partitions, gates of different types (for moving from a room of one theme to another) and even doors that can only be used by the staff. And over time, you can (and even should) combine different themes within one museum – excursions to any region are available from any place, as well as exhibits found there. You need to somehow use the purchased territories near the main building, if you spent money on them.
And it’s good that Two Point Museum generally explains most of the gameplay mechanics well. The player is often led by the hand so that he or she performs certain actions in order, which he or she will subsequently have to repeat more than once. But not everything is explained, and some things remain a mystery until a related task appears. For example, at some point you will be asked to achieve an average employee satisfaction rate above 75%. Players familiar with the series know what to do, and newcomers are not even explained that employees can be given a raise, and there is a separate menu with emoticons showing how satisfied each employee is with their income. In addition, the console controls remain crooked – what requires one click (or none at all) on a computer is performed on Xbox with two different buttons. But these are the peculiarities of the genre – the developers probably did everything possible to make playing on a gamepad mostly comfortable.
It’s hard to say what it is, but it attracts attention.
***
Two Point Museum successfully develops the formula that was loved in the previous two games of the series, and changes the direction a little – this time, you want to pay much more attention to the appearance of the premises than in the “tycoons” about hospitals and universities. Expeditions encourage you to take better care of the staff, you want to beautifully design funny exhibits and place them in the most prominent places, and numerous mechanics make each next hour of the game even more exciting than the previous one. In general, a real artifact, which in the universe of this game would have the maximum delight indicator – you don’t even have to be a fan of the genre to disappear into Two Point Museum for at least a few days.
Advantages:
- Five unique museums with different themes that can be mixed later;
- The updated campaign structure encourages you to return to old locations rather than abandon them;
- Expeditions made the game even more multi-layered and diverse;
- A large number of artifacts that you want to hunt for not only for the sake of evaluations, but also to decorate museums;
- Extensive settings for individualizing rooms and interiors.
Disadvantages:
- Many mechanics are well explained, but some difficulties have to be solved without hints.
Graphic arts
The familiar, charming visual style is not much different from previous Two Points. Watching funny little people taking pictures of exhibits never gets boring.
Sound
Simple, cheerful music is not annoying, but in such games, many people probably prefer to spend time listening to their own playlists or podcasts.
Single player game
The campaign includes five unique museums, which you will need to return to as you progress to get higher ratings. There is also a “sandbox” mode, where all the possibilities are open right away.
Estimated time of completion
You can simply complete the campaign in about 50 hours, but then you start hunting for three stars in each location (this is the highest rating) and spend the same amount of time, if not more.
Collective game
Not foreseen.
General impression
The best part of the Two Point series, which managed to find the perfect balance between management routine and creative expression.
Rating: 9.0 / 10
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