Review – Monopoly (Xbox 360)

Posted on 04. Nov, 2008 by Strident in Reviews

Dear EA. Go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass go, do not collect £200.

It was a simple job. You bought the license to Monopoly from Hasbro. All you had to do was produce a straightforward conversion of one of the world’s most loved board games. Stick in some online multiplayer, pop it onto the Xbox Live marketplace. Produce a ton of customised boards based on your other game properties. Then sit back and watch the money pile in.

Instead you chose to release this bloated “last generation” disk version. Oh dear.

Yes, EA’s gone and mucked Monopoly up. Well, that’s perhaps a little unfair. They’ve managed to deliver a perfectly respectable electronic version of the family favourite that saves you from having to bother with dice, plastic houses and piles of paper money. But, to be honest, the version I had on the Playstation 2 did that. The one I’ve got for my iPod did that. And the version I have for my mobile phone. Even the version I had for the Sinclair Spectrum 48K did that. Back in 1985.

What EA’s chosen developer hasn’t done is include the one really obvious thing that the Xbox 360 excels at. Online multiplayer. You’re restricted to playing with people sitting in front of your television. That’s not necessarily a killer blow but it is hugely disappointing.

The selection of boards included on this retail title is also a major let down, especially considering the cost of the package. You start off with access to the classic Monopoly set for your region. There’s also the recent World Edition board. Everything else is just dross. Why would you possibly want to play a round on a board based on sweets or cheese? At the very least we should’ve been given access to the US board or an option to create a customised set with our own place names and choice of counters

So, what exactly have EA chosen to pad out this retail disk with? Their brand new ‘The Riches Edition’, that’s what. They’ve only gone and turned Monopoly into a party game!

The results aren’t actually as bad as you might think. The mini-games are all vaguely inspired by Community Chest or Chance cards. You might, for example, be sawing prison bars to get out of jail free or be catching votes in order to become chairman of the board. I wasn’t that impressed by the way some of the mini-games worked, particularly the ones that involve you picking up and moving items. You can’t help feeling they were designed specifically for another console… a little white one, with ‘Nintendo’ written on it.

The actual mechanics of the game, beyond the tedious action elements, is quite clever. Your performance in the mini-games determines the order you pick one of the four dice thrown at the start of each round. The number shown corresponds to how many randomly placed counters you get on the board.

Money is done away with. If a counter lands on a vacant property it’s bought automatically. Rent is paid by handing over properties to your opponents. Jail fees require the surrender of several of your assets. Community chest and chance cards attempt to balance the game by giving losing players chances to steal from the portfolio of richer opponents. Landing on one of your own monopolies allows you to build houses.

At the start of the game you’ll want to select dice with high numbers on, in order to snap up all the vacant properties. Towards the end, though, you’ll probably want to select low numbers to avoid having a counter placed on your opponents’ land.

It’s not a bad game. There are three different variations of Riches, each with a specific number of rounds and selection of chance and community chest cards. The top tier even features basic property trading. I just think there are much better party games out there. Riches Monopoly’s doesn’t have a wide enough selection of mini-games and the board game element relies too heavily on luck to be much fun.

In a way it seems a bit churlish to complain about this electronic release of Monopoly. You’re basically getting two games for your money after all. The problem is that the people who want one of the games aren’t necessarily going to want the other.

EA’s Monopoly is like an XBLA game where you’ve been forced to buy all the additional DLC up front. I love Monopoly, and this is a fair enough conversion, but I can’t recommend picking it up at this price unless the party game section of the package really appeals to you. You can simply get your Monopoly fix cheaper elsewhere.