Two Point Museum Review

Two Point Museum is the new gold standard for the Two Point series. There are many reasons why, but to distill it down, the gameplay has been drastically expanded with the new mission system and with five different museum types, variety has been vastly improved, which has been a real achilles for the series. If you already love the series, Two Point Museum will easily become your favourite, alternatively, if you have never tried it or possibly bounced off before, Two Point Museum has made enough adjustments in the right areas to welcome new players.

WHAT IS TWO POINT MUSEUM

You begin your journey at Memento Mile Museum, a prehistoric Musuem with an absence of a curator and you just happen to be the right person for the job. Memento Mile basically serves as your tutorial for the game, as it has the important structural aspects already laid out for you. It will then begin walking you through the first steps that you need to do and how to do it including hiring staff and filling the museum with exhibits.

It doesn’t take long for Two Point Museum to take off the training wheels as it trusts the players intelligence as after the being taught the core systems, it allows you to explore and learn a lot of the systems on your own. It also very subtlety tries to guide you with an invisible hand as the announcer will offer some snarky advice such as “the museum will no longer be taking donations because we don’t have enough donation boxes”. Two Point Museum is a very layered game and this is perfect example of something that not only adds humor to the experience, but offers assistance without you ever feeling like you are being told what to do.

Two Point Museum is one of the best paced games I’ve ever played as I there was always a carrot dangling just out of reach, the carrot never felt too far, I never felt out of my depth, and I was never bored. As a result, Two Point Museum absorbed me. as the hours easily melted away.

If I told you the gameplay loop, it would sound boring. Hire people, send some on an expedition to find something new for the Museum and then display it and start the loop over.  However, Two Point Museums strength comes in the minutiae. Not to mention there are over 200 unique exhibits to discover and display. Almost everything under the museum roof will be part of your job duties and no matter what the task, it never becomes monotonous.

Everything might appear simple at first, but as with the rest of the game, Two Point Museum has layers and depth and the mechanics are no exception. Let’s use the most common example of displaying an artifact. It might begin with deciding which area of there musuem to display it, but then you need to make sure it has the highest amount of buzz, which you would do by decorating around it, making sure people are getting enough knowledge from it by placing informational signs around it. In addition, each artifact has multiple tiers that can be discovered. Finally, you will eventually do enough research and analysis that will unlock perks and perk slots on exhibits, which will add great passive benefits to them like reducing the speed that they accumulate dust, which will free up a maintenance worker for other jobs in the museum.

Speaking of workers, when it comes to hiring, people come in all varieties with traits and quirks, but you will also need to train them to teach them new skills as they gain experience and new slots for knowledge open up. It might be something like a tour guide in the museum or it might be better survey skills in the field with some of these skills being requirements to reach new expedition areas, which will allow you to find the rarest artifacts.

TWO POINT CHANGES

One of the main detractors of the Two Point series is that the scenery gets repetitive and stale. Due to this, despite making progress, it can feel like you aren’t moving forward and Two Point Museum remedies this in a few ways.

To begin with, the addition of missions or expeditions as they are referred to in Two Point Museum greatly expands the gameplay. To display exhibits at your museum, you will first need to go on expeditions to discover artifacts, which like everything else in Two Point Museum, begins simple. Usually, they are very inexpensive and only require one expert. After that, they can become costly, require multiple people with different specialities and to reach new areas, you will need to meet certain criteria. However, just like the pacing in the rest of the game, each expedition grows more challenging incrementally making them always just out of reach.

Furthermore, becoming a phenomenal curator, as you are, has drawn attention outside of the prehistoric circle. This means that your curating services are required at other “museums”. Outside of the traditional prehistoric, there are four other types including aquarium, supernatural, space and science.

Just one of these settings alone would be enough content for a full game and would feel more analogous to the first two entries. The less traditional “museums” are where the Two Point Museum gets back into its quirky comfort zone as the Supernatural Museums features things like polterguest exhibits where you can display a ghost in their time appropriate setting.

Two Point and humor are inseparable, but as with all comedy, it's always about being able to strike the perfect balance. There is still loads of tongue in cheek humour with the exhibits, the patrons, the radio station and the announcer, but it feels slightly more restrained, at least at the beginning. Two Point Museum is still very funny, but for the benefit of the game it’s less reliant on humor and more reliant on gameplay variety. As a result I found that hours can melt away as you constantly have an abundance of plates spinning as you inch closer to the next milestone.

One coincidental change for the series is that with the new setting, it actually becomes much more of a family game. Designing a campus or a hospital is not something that you want to do with your family, but visiting museums is a family activity, which meant that trying to determine what the next best plan of action was for the Museum together on the couch was a lot of fun.

CRTICISMS

Despite being the best in the series thus far, there were a few areas that could have been improved or added. In terms of improvement, not everything lines up perfectly when designing the layout of your museum and you occasionally have items that clip through walls. Another technical issue, at least on Steam Deck and Xbox is that when your museum is operating on all cylinders, it can be a little tricky to pinpoint certain items for small adjustments.

The two modes included were campaign and sandbox, which was added in a previous title and these modes will easily provide you with hundreds of hours of entertainment, but it would have been great if they could have added another mode like a weekly challenge. Something that only gives you a certain amount of time or budget to achieve certain goals or to do it with certain limitations. Having another incentive to return after the campaign would have been great.

WISHLIST

The two final areas that is a combination of a wishlist and criticism. Every time I go to a museum, two of the major problematic areas are parking and food. Both tend to be atrocious and it would have been nice and these are also ways to generate income for the museum. I would have loved to go down the rabbit hole of food offerings as opposed to having just two vending machines and a coffee station. Obviously, if you offer more junk food, you will have people that are less energtic and might need to use the facilities more.

CONCLUSION

Two Point Museum is a lot of what you already know and love about the series. However, the changes made to the existing formula elevate Two Point Museum from just another entry in the series to the new standard moving forward. The expanded gameplay and improved variety means that not only is there a lot more to manage, but it also means that the lighthearted tone isn’t doing the heavy lifting anymore, instead it accentuates the experience, which is now equal parts addicting, strategy and fun.

Two Point Museum feels less like a sequel and more of a strong new direction for the series, which has me excited for where Two Point will go from here.

9/10