Two Point Museum: Rides & Relics DLC is a delicious taster course

Two Point Museum: Rides & Relics could be a massive clue about what comes next for Two Point Studios. The team has been known to slip easter eggs into its DLC content, teasing crossovers in games like Two Point Campus and Two Point Hospital and leaving crumbs for players to follow.

This latest one is more obvious than most, as Rides & Relics feels like a direct lead-in to a future Two Point Studios game very possibly focussed on the roller coaster management genre, following in the footsteps of greats like RollerCoaster Tycoon.

The DLC is simply a taster though, and a smaller scope does leave plenty of room for wanting.

Revamped expeditions serve a small cohort of rides

Rides & Relics begins in pretty standard fashion. You’re introduced to the brand new location of Riquetti Gardens, and you’re given the task of exploring the Gearbox Fairgrounds in new expeditions to discover exhibits for your museum.

The twist is that expeditions uncover blueprints, instead of more traditional exhibits. The first blueprint will unlock a new ride and subsequent discoveries will unlock upgraded versions of that ride, as well as perks to attach, mascots to roam your museum-park and other minor goodies.

If you’re looking for exhibits to display, you’ll actually need to travel to other maps because this DLC reinvents the formula.

As well as switching up the nature of expeditions and their rewards, Rides & Relics also twists the nature of your museum. Riquetti Gardens is a small space with lots of open outdoor areas. Rather than building directly inside the museum, you’ll actually need to make use of the space outside it, placing your various rides, food and benches in the sunshine to encourage visitors to explore widely.

The central museum building serves as more of a meeting point and relaxation spot housing necessary toilets, cafeterias, gift shops and mascot stations. You can put exhibits in this space if you wish (and there are Funfair-themed exhibits to collect) but this will create a split focus.

Really what you want to do in Riquetti Gardens is figure out how to maximise the rides you find, uncovering blueprints and ensuring every guest that attends your museum-park has a wonderful time.

You’re really building a theme park more than you’re building a museum, although by nature Two Point Museum must fit this purpose within its existing game mechanics. It means the systems aren’t quite wonderfully cohesive, as activities like blueprint expeditions and ride building are retrofitted into the Museum engine – but with enough willpower and elbow grease, you can make the mechanics work for you.

Building your first roller coaster

What is most compelling about the new Rides & Relics DLC is the opportunity to build rollercoasters using a new snap-lock system that takes some figuring out. While most rides are standalone and can simply be placed with a queue, rollercoasters need to be built from the ground up and have set bounds you can customise within.

The system will be most familiar to those who’ve played RollerCoaster Tycoon in the past, with some added modern twists and turns. Once you place your first pillar you’ll be able to rotate, twist, tilt and height-adjust it as long as it still reasonably connects with the pillars behind ahead.

As you go along you can add chains to get your coaster higher-up along your track, as well as high-speed boosts to push trains further and faster along the rail.

At first the system feels a bit unwieldy by nature of it being aligned to the grid-based system of Two Point Museum, rather than being a brand new mechanic. But the more you fiddle with its twists and turns, the more you’ll understand how its loops can be manipulated for a high-speed thriller that may terrorise your guests (although guest nausea is more tied to maintenance level, rather than twists).

This isn’t a superbly easy system. Sometimes you’ll try to customise your tracks and your loops will end up twisting and braiding together, rendering it impossible to put the loop you want on your coaster. The tutorial doesn’t go in-depth about why this happens either, so it’s really up to you to figure out how best to place your pillars and how you can move them around to create a fast-paced and exciting addition to your park-museum.

There’s also an odd lack of testing mechanics, so you just need to open your coaster and hope for the best.

Should this be an experiment for a possible next game in the Two Point Studios canon focussed solely on rollercoaster and theme park building, the existing mechanics provide a solid basis to work from, but with plenty of room to grow.

What we want from a Two Point Park simulator game

As mentioned, there is a great basis here for a new theme park game from the Two Point Studios team, with many familiar elements from Two Point Museum: Rides & Relics well-positioned for a return.

We’d love to see the rollercoaster building mechanic developed for a more layered experience, with a particular focus on the ease of building between pillars and creating twists and turns without completely breaking coasters. A tutorial could help, as well as more customisation options and a way to break out of the grid for a wilder and more interesting ride, potentially with greater rewards for more complex designs.

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The expedition system would also need to be completely reimagined, as its current form is relatively unexciting, particularly when you find all the rides and end up simply finding upgrade blueprints or perks that don’t tangibly change the experience.

It would be more pertinent, in a future game, to have a robust system of ride placement that allows for more customisation as you grow your park – although how this is imagined within the slapstick realm of Two Point County remains to be seen.

As it stands, this DLC is a taster course for a potential future game and one that brims with promise. With a smaller scope, this DLC isn’t quite the robust theme park simulator that it could be, but its brightest ideas shine through and with enough time and patience, you can create a facsimile of the wonderful theme park you imagine.

As a foundation for future developments, there’s plenty to like here.

A PC review code for Two Point Museum: Rides & Relics was provided to ScreenHub for the purposes of this review.

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