Welcome Back to Two Point County
Welcome back to Two Point County. This time around your management skills are called on to manage five different museums across the area, each radically different from the other. As before, Two Point Museum tasks you with developing and running several facilities all whilst keeping your guests happy and satisfied.
For those who have played the excellent Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus games, you may be wondering if this is just the same again with a different skin. I must admit I shared similar concerns at first, but these all melted away within the first hour of playing.
Comical Characters and Quirky Charm
For the uninitiated, Two Point Museum retains the wonderfully comical animations, tannoy announcements and overall tone of the series. It remains utterly charming, creative and still has a curiously addictive soundtrack. Whether it’s watching your guests get eaten by giant plants, spooked by haunted exhibits or trying to keep the kids in check, you’ll have a smile on your face pretty much the entire time.
Raiding for Relics
The first big change Two Point Museum from previous games is the need to head out on expeditions to find exhibits to fill your new gaff. This opens up a map with various points of interest (POIs) to explore, in fact there’s over 100 across five different areas.
Before setting off, you’ll need to assign a team with the required skillset and pack key items to ensure the expedition is a success. There are over 200 exhibits to be found, all of varying rarity and condition. These are scattered but unique to different POIs, however you’ll need to meet certain objectives to unlock new areas too.
This is the general progression approach for your museums as well, and guides you through the game whilst doubling up as a tutorial at the start. The exhibits fall into six main types but there are more than 30 sub categories meaning you’ll be bringing fossils, frozen finds, marine life, fearsome plants, haunted articles and much, much more back to your museums.
However, once acquired you’ll also need to work hard to keep them safe from the constant threat posed by thieves and organised gangs. Hiring security guards, as well as installing cameras and manning the control room will be key to prevent those valuable finds from being lifted.
Educating and Entertaining
In order to be successful, you will need to educate and entertain your guests in each museum. Exhibits are the bedrock of achieving both, however you will need to ensure there are enough information stands to support your attractions and improve the knowledge imparted to visitors, as well as donation points to rake in the extra cash. In order to receive the largest donations, you’ll need to dial up the buzz in your museums. This is where the decorative items come into play, many which are needed to unlock each exhibit’s special buzz bonus. There are over 350 decorative items to play with, and as before the main way to do this is by spending that hard earned Kudosh. Far from just being for making your museum pretty, these items are crucial in maximising the buzz and for the overall success of your ventures.
Tours, Kids, and Research: New Features in Two Point Museum
Also new to Two Point Museum is the ability to set up your own museum tours, which is also a great way of banking some extra cash. The great thing about these is the fact you can easily design your own tour by building an exhibition list, whilst at the same time seeing how well the tour will perform before you confirm your choices.
Naturally, the same attractions that may intrigue and wow the adults, will not do the same for the kids. This means more interactive, but still educational, exhibits will need to be researched and built in an effort to keep everyone entertained. As before, you can click on each guest to get a deeper insight into how their visit is going, which is very useful for helping you decide what to do next.
Of course, research is also an important part of your museum’s work but you will need to deconstruct exhibits in order to gain more knowledge about them. This will destroy them, however new items will become available which can be tracked through the enlightenment menu. Also, perks will be unlocked that can be attached to exhibits that will boost knowledge and buzz as well as having other effects.
Sponsorships and Exhibitions: Keeping Your Museum Afloat
As ever, it’s not all plain sailing in Two Point Museum and if you start to bleed cash you could quite quickly find yourself staring down the barrel of bankruptcy. Thankfully, there are more ways than ever before to prevent this happening and you getting shut down, thanks to sponsorship deals. These may come with negative effects, but popping some choice product in your gift shop, as an example, will bag you some extra cash in the process. The ever trusty loans are available as always, just watch those steep repayments.
To break up the gameplay, you’ll come across three exhibitions as you progress through Two Point Museum, which are essentially pop-up challenges. These levels throw you into a museum mid development and set you an objective to hit against the clock, such as running marketing campaigns and attracting as many visitors as you can. Naturally, these are much shorter endeavours but enjoyable in their own right.
Familiar and Fresh
Series staples such as room building, hiring staff and the vast majority of your analysis and management tools carry over from the previous games. However, the new game mechanics feel exactly that, new. This isn’t simply a copy of paste job, the talented Two Point Studios folks have managed to keep the sim series feeling fresh and new, but most of all bags of fun.
The only downside is that the UI is still clunky at times, despite working pretty well overall. There are lots of menus, and sometimes I would completely lose where I was, and had to hit B a few times to exit and start again. This happened when room building and needing to change my mind, as well as digging down to find key information such as buzz bonuses for my exhibits.
Curating Your Career
When it comes to working across the county, Two Point Museum is structured a little differently to before. You can still earn multiple stars in each location (more than ever before in fact), however this time you are purposely steered around from one level to another, before being prompted as when to return to a previous location to bag more stars. This is done through levelling up your Curator Class, which challenges you to complete specific objectives before being able to do so.
At first, five museums (as well as the three shorter travel levels) may seem a little meagre. However, if you think of each star as a chapter per location (which is pretty realistic) then it’s clear there’s hours of gameplay to get stuck into here. I actually prefer this to previous games where, to some extent, you were playing the same level again and again, albeit under slightly different conditions.
If you want to remove pretty much all the guard rails and wing it, then Sandbox Mode is for you. Stars are still available here but for completing more generalised objectives geared towards growth. Otherwise, it’s up to you in terms of the path you take.
A Must-Play for Simulation Fans and Two Point Enthusiasts
Overall Two Point Museum keeps all the great things about the series, but cultivates the formula and manages to evolve the gameplay without losing the magical balance. It’s further proof that the franchise has plenty of ideas and could, in theory, go pretty much anywhere for the next outing.
Two Point Museum is arguably the best in the series yet, and keeps the hot streak going for the consistently brilliant sim series.
Your Links
Two Point Studios Unearths Two Point Museum: Become a Curator of Curiosities – https://www.thexboxhub.com/two-point-studios-unearths-two-point-museum-become-a-curator-of-curiosities/
Design Your Dream Museum: Two Point Museum Announces Release Date and Pre-Order Bonuses – https://www.thexboxhub.com/design-your-dream-museum-two-point-museum-announces-release-date-and-pre-order-bonuses/
Buy Two Point Museum on Xbox – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/two-point-museum/9NFHRF1M4W3Z/0010
There’s the Explorer Edition too – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/two-point-museum-explorer-edition/9PBLZPHNBWFR/0010
