Night at the Museum 2

At the moment I am trying to spread out some longer, more difficult games with some quick wins. Night at the Museum 2 falls nicely into the second category. It was another game I was able to complete in the space of a weekend which is always a feel-good moment for achievement hunters.

I was left a little on the back foot with the storyline as I’ve never seen the movie. I enjoyed the first one though so I thought how bad can it be? You basically follow Ben Stiller as he travels around various museums meeting characters from the first movie and some new ones from this adventure. The ultimate goal is to stop Amunrah’s evil twin wax brother from using the tablet to bring other shit to life in order to take over the world or something.

The sound effects and graphics left a lot to be desired if I’m honest. The game was out in 2009 and looks like it wasn’t prepared for the 360 graphics engine – unforgivable nearly 4 years after the console was released.

Gameplay is a tricky one. The mechanics are very simple and you are introduced to all of them in one go at the start. You then have to recollect all the special skills as you travel through the museums. It is very possible to die which in a way, makes the game technically more difficult than Prey, but it is still a fairly troubleless completion. This is good as none of my deaths were actually down to gameplay glitches.

There are a few vehicle sections which were the most frustrating aspect of the game. To be honest I’m not sure why games even bother with obligatory vehicle sections. When most games put them in, they seem to be counterintuitive to the control system already in place. Night at the Museum 2 is no exception to this but they weren’t so bad as to give me nightmares. The only major drama was controlling the Lunar Lander.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 37 Achievements

There really in no drama here. You have to play through the game once and pick up all the collectibles to get 34 of the achievements and the collectibles are not that hard to find. I didn’t even have to use a guide and that says a lot.

One of the remaining three is for bagging all of the other achievements so effectively an auto-unlock. There is another for an optional puzzle in one of the museums and you remember the Lunar Lander I mentioned earlier? Well you have to complete that vehicle section without taking x amount of damage which was only a minor frustration but it still took me an extra attempt to get it – which subsequently unlocked the last achievement for getting all the others.

Downloadable Content – N/A

So that’s it. A simple game with easy achievements. End of. The only problem is the lack of replay value but that’s not really important from a 2009 game that I’m playing in 2015.