preview Two Point Museum: If you think that this is just a simple management game, you are completely wrong…
At Two Point Studios we seem to have set ourselves a challenge: to develop management games on themes that have not or rarely been used in the past. After the university campus, here is the museum! And in general, it is the entire principle of the exhibition that will be your playground at the Two Point Museum. As always, the goal is to make a lot of money. But be careful, knowledge is also important!
We were able to play the first three scenarios of Two Point Museum in about six hours of gameplay. So we're at what we call a tycoon, a video game where you build your building to be as efficient as possible, with the general goal of making money. Is it easy to build a museum? We won't go into detail here because the answer is yes. Two Point Studios has perfected the art of making things build efficiently, and we can already give them credit for that. What worries us more is that there aren't many museum building games! Your mission is to shower your visitors with knowledge while freeing them from their nest egg.
Expeditions and real strategies
For your museum to be a success, you need to showcase beautiful elements. To do this, Two Point Museum borrows the mechanics of a competitor, Jurassic World: Evolution. Your staff must embark on an expedition to find relics, from dinosaur skeletons to rare plants and clownfish. (we will come back to this). The planisphere opens the door to diverse journeys within this fictional world. Unlocking all elements of a room requires multiple visits, and even more if you want to maximize your score. Since there are already many destinations in this beta, there is a lot to do. It will not be enough to send your troops at random: there is a whole system of experience, skills, items that you can take with you… Which will affect the result. An expedition is being prepared! Random events will present themselves to spice up your explorers' adventures and mimic the adventures of the journey: will you 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 collect a discovery that you can present in your company. Opening the large box is reminiscent of loot boxes, although there is obviously no microtransaction system in the game. Your treasure can be more or less rare, of more or less good quality… and therefore generate more or less “buzz”, one of the assets that your visitors are primarily looking for. The concern we might have is this If we really want the best possible quality for an item, we may need to “farm” the shipments.. Likewise if we want to put all the parts of a dinosaur skeleton together. We run the risk of trying to speed up the time waiting for the next expedition, especially since we can only start one expedition at a time (at least this was the case in our session). Watch out for repetition…
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'll spend most of your time building a beautiful building to welcome your visitors. This is also the first time The aesthetics of your designs have an important influence. The appeal of your exhibition also depends on your ability to embellish it with decorationsas relevant to the topic as possible. In addition to other administrative elements that cannot be neglected, you also need to keep your properties in good condition. Security, for example, with guards patrolling, collecting financial support from your visitors, but also having to keep an eye on the surveillance cameras that you have carefully placed. You also have to organize tours and pay attention to their topics or length in order to get a good tip at the end. You also need to manage research into your insights to improve your knowledge and therefore what you pass on to customers. And you even have to watch the children!
Since each visitor has their own requirements, they even have different profiles, from the teacher who wants access to a lot of knowledge to the children who are better to keep an eye on… For the good of your collection! Interactive attractions can be built for this purpose, because as the saying goes: the best way to learn is to have fun. Optimization fans who want to please everyone will get their money's worth here. But the best argument for maintaining our interest in the Two Point Museum is the immense content it promises to offer.
An evening at the museum to have fun
During this six hour session we were able to explore the archaeological, botanical, aquatic and “terrible” themes. It's difficult to know in advance how many other themes there will be, especially since the studio is used to offering DLCs with new themes; But The pleasant surprise comes from the sub-themes and especially from the changes they bring about in the proposed gameplay! So the topic of water invites you to look for relics that you can display in a very classic way… But also for fish for which you have to provide an aquarium. You have to feed them, care for them and regulate the water temperature (not all fish are the same temperature, that means multiple tanks!)… It's a real game within the game. And if we add to this the management of the humidity in the room for tropical plants, the temperature that must be kept very cold for the frozen yeti (otherwise it will attack your visitors…), the dinosaur bones that must be assembled or the Need to create a nice room for trapped ghosts (Yes, yes… And taking into account the era in which they lived to decorate the room in question, please…) arises a huge number of possibilities ! And when you consider that at 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 have had a tendency to complete a level and unlock all the objectives before moving on to the next. From now on it will be impossible The game forces you to progress through several museums in parallele. This back and forth will allow us to see different things on a regular basis and we suspect that the idea is to avoid repetition, the mortal enemy of these types of games, as much as possible.
No impressions
Aside from the handling, which is always impeccable in Two Point games, the biggest fear of simulation game developers is and remains repetition and the need to renew the experience. By choosing a theme that seems very specific at first glance, Two Point Museum aims to offer several different gameplays in a single game. After six hours spent with the title, we feel like we have scratched the surface of the possibilities, the multitude, full of fun little things to manage and, above all, the themes proposed and the different mechanisms that they impose. The biggest fear remains the expedition system, which is exhilarating at first but can quickly become a hindrance to the fun. Will he succeed in preventing our games from 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
