At Two Point Studios, we seem to have set ourselves a challenge: to make management games on themes not or rarely used in the past. After the university campus, here is the museum! And more generally, it is the whole principle of exhibition which, in Two Point Museum, will be your playground. The objective, as always, is to make a lot of money. But be careful, knowledge is important too!
We were able to play the first three scenarios of Two Point Museum, in a session of about six hours of play. So we are on what we call a tycoon, a video game where you build your building so that it is also efficient as possible, with the general aim of making money. Is building a museum easy? We are not going to dwell on this because the answer is: yes. Two Point Studios has perfected the art of letting you build things efficiently, and we can already give them credit for that. What concerns us more is that there are not many museum construction games! Showering your visitors with knowledge while relieving them of their nest egg, that’s your mission.
Expeditions and real strategies
For your museum to be a hit, you must have beautiful elements to present. For this, Two Point Museum borrows the mechanics of a competitor, Jurassic World: Evolution. Your employees will have to go on an expedition to find relics, from dinosaur skeletons to rare plants and clown fish. (we will come back to this). The planisphere opens the door to multiple journeys within this fictional world. Several visits will be necessary to unlock all the elements of a space, and even more if you want to maximize your score. With the many destinations already present during this beta, there is plenty to do. It will not be enough to send your troops at random: there is a whole system of experience, skills, objects to take with you… Which will influence the result. An expedition is being prepared! Random events will impose themselves on you to spice up the adventure of your explorers, emulating the adventures of the journey: will you choose to hide during a sandstorm, at the risk of missing a discovery, or will you try your luck and risk injury?
At the end of the expedition, you will collect a discovery to present at your establishment. Opening the big crate is reminiscent of loot boxes, although there is no micro transaction system in the game, obviously. Your treasure can be more or less rare, be of more or less good quality… And therefore generate more or less “buzz”, one of the values that your visitors are looking for as a priority. The worry we may have is that if we absolutely want to have the best possible quality for an object, we may have to “farm” the shipments. Likewise if we want to bring together all the pieces of a dinosaur skeleton. We risk wanting to speed up the passage of time to wait for the next expedition, especially since we can only launch one at a time (at least in our session this was the case). Be careful of repetitiveness…
Model a modest museum
Rest assured, these expeditions are a big novelty that deserves our attention, but they remain a small part of the game. Two Point Museum is the worthy little brother of Hospital and Campus, and you will spend most of your time to build a beautiful building to welcome your visitors. This is also the first time that the aesthetics of your constructions have an important impact. The buzz of your exhibition also depends on your ability to dress it up with decorationsif possible relevant in terms of thematization. You will also need to maintain your objects in good condition, among other management elements that should not be neglected. Security for example, with Guards who patrol, who collect financial patronage from your visitors, but who must also keep an eye on the surveillance cameras that you have wisely placed. You will also have to organize guided tours, taking care of their themes or their length to have a good tip at the end, you will also have to manage research on your findings to improve your knowledge and therefore what you pass on to customers. . And you will even have to watch out for the kids!
Because each visitor has their own requirements, they even have different profiles, from the teacher who wants to have access to a lot of knowledge to the children who are better to keep an eye on… For the good of your collection! For this, interactive attractions can be built, because as the saying goes, you learn best while having fun. Optimization fans who want to please everyone will have their work cut out for them. But Two Point Museum's best argument for maintaining our interest is the immense content it promises to offer.
A night at the museum to have fun
During this six-hour session, we were able to see the archaeological, botanical, aquatic and “horrific” themes. It's difficult to know in advance how many other themes there will be, especially since the studio is used to offering DLC with new themes; but the pleasant surprise comes from the sub-themes, and especially from the changes that these generate in the proposed gameplay! Thus, the aquatic theme invites you to look for relics, to display in a very classic way… But also fish, for which you will need to provide an aquarium. You will have to feed them, maintain them, manage the water temperature (not all fish live at the same temperature, that means several tanks!)… It's a real game within a game. And if we Add to this the management of the humidity of the room for tropical plants, the temperature that must be kept very cold for the frozen Yeti (otherwise it attacks your visitors…), the dinosaur bones that must be assembled or the need to make a pretty room for captured ghosts (yes yes… And taking into account the era in which they lived to decorate the room in question please…), it creates a massive number of possibilities ! And when you understand that in each museum you can choose to exhibit or re-exhibit themes you've already unlocked elsewhere, the possibilities seem endless.
Last pleasant surprise, the progression will change compared to the studio's previous games. Maybe you too tended to completely complete a level and unlock all the objectives before moving on to the next one. From now on it will be impossible, since the game will force you to advance on several museums in parallele. This back and forth will allow us to see different things regularly, and we guess that the idea is to avoid repetitiveness as much as possible, the mortal enemy of this type of game.
Nos impressions
Apart from the always impeccable handling of Two Point games, the biggest fear of management game creators is, and will always remain, repetitiveness and the need to renew the experience. Two Point Museum, by choosing a subject that seems very specific at first glance, aims to offer multiple different gameplays in a single game. After six hours spent on the title, we have the impression of having scratched the surface of the possibilities, the multitude of fun little things to manage, and above all the themes proposed and the different mechanics that they impose. The main fear remains the expedition system, which is exhilarating at first but which can quickly put a damper on the fun. Will he be able to avoid our games being reduced to waiting for THE right object? If that were the case, we would be moving towards a tenor like this!
Editorial opinion
Exciting
