Monopoly

I was casually browsing online as you do and was surprised to find that a Monopoly game even existed for the 360, nevertheless one that had been one since 2008. I had recently started playing Monopoly as a board game on a semi-regular basis so figured that the Xbox 360 version would be an easy completion as well as confirming the actual rules for the board game without allowing anyone to cheat.

While I was a hundred percent correct with the latter, I was slightly off with the former but more on that later.

The sound effects are seriously irritating throughout which seems to be the standard for these kinds of games. At least the music during actual gameplay is relatively quiet, however that doesn’t stop Monopoly Man from being the most sinfully annoying NPC is the history of the world.

The gameplay is where the game really falls down for lots of small reasons. Introductions and tutorials are all very well and good when you start playing a game but after that, they should be completely optional, skippable or maybe have a fast forward button attached to them. This is not the case for Monopoly. During every game, you are subjected to the ‘how to play’ information at the beginning of every action which turns even the shortest game into a drawn out affair.

I may have already mentioned that Monopoly Man is seriously annoying and here is why. He has a comment to make after every single move any player makes, even the NPCs. By the end of the first game, this could be conceived as charming. However, after the fifth game, he makes you want to climb through the television and beat him to death with his own cane.

Another minor quibble is that the menu to manage your properties take a lifetime to open (at least it feels that way with every other drawn out piece of crap building up to this point) and once you are there, the interface is really unintuitive and also glitches out from time to time. There is a button you need to click on to come out of the menu and despite having the cursor over this button, it will not let you click on it. So you have to move the cursor off of the button and the move it back on in order to get out of the menu. It’s almost like EA get more money for the more hours people play their games for.

The above only covers the classic mode of the game. There is another mode called Richest which consists of mini games and massive amounts of luck in order to win. There are four players and you each roll a dice. Then you compete against each other in mini games and whoever wins the game gets to select a dice. The number on the dice reflects how many squares of the board you occupy. You can play different types of this mode but the object is to be the richest player at the end of however many rounds you chose to play. So it’s completely luck based in essence but you can influence how much luck you get by selecting the most appropriate dice, high at the beginning and low towards to end.

Richest is more fun than Classic for the sole reason that the game has less opportunities to draw out the game with poor interfaces and unnecessary dialogue but it STILL has the unskippable tutorials which are present in every game you play.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 34 Achievements

Firstly, Monopoly is made by EA, the most evil game company in the world, and I wouldn’t have even considered playing it if it had online achievements. The servers would have most likely been shut down by now, and heaven forbid they would allow local hosting even for a game with a maximum of four players and very little power required to play.

Anyway, enough about those twats - on to the achievements.

With the two game modes, come different achievements. There are 19 available in Classic and 15 in Richest. Now, the beauty to most of these is you can use local multiplayer to fix most of the skill based achievements that you don’t get playing legitimately. There are some notable exceptions to this, however, namely the 100% luck based achievements.

Rolling a double six is fine and is bound to happen in a few games of classic anyway. However, rolling three doubles to go to jail - an anti-achievement - is ridiculous. It took me ages to get this one and the only way to guarantee it is to keep playing over and over again which really hit home the gameplay issues above.

Other than that, the only other one which is problematic – and by problematic, I mean drawn-out and pointless – is the Globe Trotter achievement for landing on every property on the World Board. Factoring in the luck required to roll three doubles in a row, you now need the luck to land on all of the properties in one game. Without going out of your way, this is nigh on impossible to attain as it takes three hours minimum factoring in random chance to even get close to landing on them all. Playing a legitimate game would end long before that, even with the unskippable in between moves commentary.

There is also a time spending achievement which is for landing on every property on every board in the game. This can be done over multiple games though, so isn’t difficult, just time consuming.

Downloadable Content – N/A

It was nice to play an electronic version of Monopoly for all of two games, but after that it stopped being fun. Achievements wise, it is a monotonous grind. If you are going to go for the completion, I would recommend finding something to listen to/watch in the background. Either that or just don’t play it.