Review: Monopoly Millionaire (Xbox Live)
Score:
65%
Continuing a run of conversions of popular board games on Xbox Live is Electronic Art's Monopoly Millionaire. Released exclusively for Nokia devices last week, this is a variant of the trading board game Monopoly. The core gameplay is there, but EA have added a lot more to the game to make it feel more modern and faster paced for mobile. Was that the right thing to do?
Version Reviewed: 1.1.0.0
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The presentation is spot on, I'll give EA that. The menus are all clear and easy to navigate once you remember that the regular 'back' key is used to exit a dialog, rather than the ok/cancel combination many games adopt. With so many numbers to show while playing the game, the various views of the game (be it the board, the property cards, or other screens for trading, auctions and action), all have legible and well laid out text and buttons. The UI belies the complexity of the game.
What you will find is that all the rules of thumbs, strategies and ways of playing you might have built up over the years while playing Monopoly at home or on other computer versions will be no help at all to you when playing Monopoly Millionaire. Rather than bankrupting your opponents, you have a monetary goal to reach to gain victory, which is unsurprisingly one million, er, currency units (it's never labelled as sterling, euros, dollars, or krona).
Straight away that changes how I approach a game. Finishing with just £1 against an opponent was fine before, but now you need to build up cash to win, rather than drain an opponent of their assets.
Property costs and incomes are all changed as well. Where a rent on an original board is about 10% of the purchase cost of a property, Monopoly Millionaire sees a base rent at about half the cost of the empty property, and a single house will reclaim the value of the property. This makes cash flow in the game much more volatile, and it's far easier now to earn back what you invest.
The biggest additions to the game are the fortune cards. These are like the Chance and Community Chest cards of old, and offer more opportunities to earn money or gift it to your opponents. It adds a very big random element into the game, as there is a card on every property at the start of the game so when you land on a property for the first time, you'll also pick up an action card (or store it for later use).
The changes made by Electronic Arts all make sense, in a rather clinical way. While the time to take a single turn remains static, the rest of the game feels much faster to play, and there is a lot of currency moving about (accompanied by stars flying around the screen).
The question I have to ask is this. Is it still 'Monopoly' after all these changes? You still have the properties to buy and build houses and hotels on, you still have the dog, car, boat, and classic pieces, you have the money, the properties grouped in twos and threes by colour... When you boil it down, you can find the elements that make up Monopoly. But you really need to look beyond a lot of fluff.
For me, Electronic Arts have over-egged the pudding here. The core game has been meddled with so that what made Monopoly a slow burn game that allowed small advantages to build up over time has been smothered in shiny graphics, big numbers, and the idea that wild swings in currency levels will make the game more 'exciting'.
Silly things like allowing you to upgrade your token to earn more and pay more if you want, and far too much animation with over-eager 'special' effects, spoil what could have been a nice implementation.
My main issue is that these changes all create an artificial sense of competitiveness. Even in its original board game variant, Monopoly had some random elements, but strategy could overcome a run of bad luck. I never get the feeling that you could manage that in monopoly Millionaire, with the currency swings, the fortune cards, and the punitive levels of even the lowest fines on show.
Technically, Electronic Arts have a piece of code that is fast and fluid, showing off a digital representation of a physical board with a good 3D engine. There are lots of sound effects and smart icons and UI features that guide you through complicated issues such as offering trades and conducting auctions.
To me this is Monopoly in name only. It's a trading game with a lot of variables out of control of the player, and while many will like that sort of game, it's not for me. I think I'll advance to Mayfair.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at