Two Point Museum Review - Evolution Darwin Would Be Proud Of
If you had told me that the sequel to Two Point Campus, which I liked just fine but hadn’t thought about in ages was going to be absolutely fantastic, I’m not sure I would have believed you. Campus was enjoyable enough, but it didn’t quite scratch the itch for the management game. Two Point Museum I thought was going to be more of the same. Let this be my full serving of humble pie. I have officially been hoisted.
You start the game with a single museum, which specialises in palaeontology. The core loop is as follows: decorate the museum with exhibits, make sure it’s staffed enough to cover the relevant maintenance such as keeping exhibits clean and maintained, cleaning up trash, and that counters are staffed for sales, and finally going out on expeditions to find new exhibits for the museum. There’s a lot to do, and it gets exponentially more challenging.
Museum has a pretty good balance though. The skill floor is low, but the ceiling is high. It’s easy to get into the game and make things work, but truly exceptional museums will require a good understanding of all the management mechanics, something I did not succeed at during the review period. All of my museums worked fine, but I found it challenging to make things work exactly as I needed them to. Managing staff needs was complex and I found the tools here a bit lacking. Guest needs management has gotten better since previous games, but I still found it problematic to build a museum that was functioning super smoothly. Despite there being lots of things to fulfil needs in good locations, I found guests would pass them by (especially kids and their need for entertainment) and get tired and leave the museum. Could be bugs, could be me. I did try though
The shakeup in this game is around museums themselves. Where in previous games you would complete a mission to three stars and move on, now each museum can be moved between at will. This was useful because sometimes I’d want unlocks that were a lot easier to achieve at another museum. Each of the experts is specialised in the type of exhibit, so when going on expeditions you’d need to make sure you had well-trained people. It doesn’t mean each museum only has a single type of exhibit though, as there was a lot of cross-migration between them. The palaeontology museum moves into botany, the marine museum crosses over with the supernatural, space plays nice with science.
Even though each of the museums is unique too, they all have unique and interesting mechanics. Space requires expeditions to find gadgets with symbols on them, which can be put in the radius of anomalies to activate them. Science can build their own exhibits which give boosts, but also get upgraded through interactions. There are a lot of cool systems here, and I was eager to play around with them all as soon as I had unlocked them.
Money was an interesting problem though. In other games, I always saw a path forward to making money, usually through industry. Because of the focus on entertainment and knowledge things got murkier here. Expeditions cost money in relation to their difficulty, so you could really burn through that cash if you were trying to maximise an exhibit. Sometimes you’re absolutely flush with cash, sometimes you’d be waiting until the next quarter just to be able to go do some more research or build a room.
The most interesting thing to me though is in the actual exhibits. The more you visit a region to find an exhibit, the higher your chance at getting a better version of it, which would then have more perk slots for buffs, and higher ‘buzz’, one of the guest’s entertainment metrics. Duplicates could be destroyed in a deconstructor to give higher knowledge and for some exhibits, they could be completed with more duplicates. Add this to the chance of finding specific objects over others, and there’s a good reason to keep going out on expeditions to keep perfecting your exhibits.
Then there’s the humour. I love these dumb little jokes that are sprinkled throughout the game. From the security guards using giant pepper grinders to one of the exhibits being a fridge fossil lodged in ice. They’re just good quality little bits, and I loved seeing them when they pop up. There’s also the Two Point radio station which has a bunch of references to previous games and a good deal of humour sprinkled throughout.
Two Point Museum was a huge surprise to me. I knew what I’d be getting in to, but it blew my expectations out of the water. Moving between museums is fun and novel, there’s good humour and the management is pretty good, if not surprisingly deep. Sandbox mode will keep me busy for some time too, as there’s a slew of options to customise the experience. Here’s to hoping more gets added down the line via DLC too, as I am quite hungry for more.
Two Point Museum was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
