Game Reviews

Monopoly Here & Now: The World Edition

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Monopoly Here & Now: The World Edition

Oh no! It's another mobile version of Monopoly! These are hard to review, since the age-old classic is more a part of gaming culture than a football with a Game Boy strapped to it. It can be as boring and lonely as playing solitaire at an insurance seminar and as dynamic and exciting as being a sun tan lotion vendor at the Playboy Mansion. All of which speaks volumes about the breadth of Monopoly's scope, but how many times can we keep buying the same game?

To be fair, this isn't just another direct conversion i it's a variation to a tweaked update of a conversion of an evolution of the original boardgame. This is Monopoly (the classic family board game) Here & Now (names and numbers adjusted to contemporise the experience): The World Edition (streets replaced by entire cities).

We took a good look at Here & Now a short while back when the license rights passed to EA, which felt it could improve on Glu's previous adaptation. EA continues to meddle with the mix in an attempt to unlock that elusive combination of new elements that will re-launch the title into gaming mania, though it might not be quite there yet.

Here & Now made some great improvements to standard Monopoly that slickened the electronic version and made it far easier to play on the micro screen. All that excellent fine-tuning has been fully retained in The World Edition, and you can still refine certain aspects of play to suit your needs. The amount of money you begin with, how auctioning off property works, remuneration for passing Go and the individual intelligence level of each computer controlled player.

This latter aspect is quite intriguing, as it helps to generate a sensation of sitting around a real Monopoly board. Living players are never of equal skill or enthusiasm when it comes to circumnavigating the paper streets of London, and adding a brainy AI and two complete dimwits makes the game a lot more invigorating. Changing the amount of money is a trickier pony to ride, as it generally seems to either leave everyone broke (which is good for stopping players buying up every property they initially land on) or filling everyone's pockets so full their trousers won't stay up (though this can be good for ensuring you get to play a long game with lots of hotels and mortgages).

It's a well known fact (that I just made up) that 84 per cent of tourists visit London purely to wander the locations they've seen on the Monopoly board, and removing those famous streets from the game may rob it of a great deal of nostalgic value in the eyes of some players. The modern update we saw previously was a pretty decent idea that retained the miserly, profiteering property developer concept and also ensured we didn't have to think in shillings and ha'pennies any more. But buying an entire city - as novel as it sounds to begin with - removes a degree of vital conceptual accessibility from the game.

We all know that Park Lane is worth more than Old Kent Road, and a quick glance at the colour beneath a house or hotel gives you an instinctual understanding of how a game of Monopoly is progressing. But there seems little point in trying to determine whether New York is more valuable than Tokyo - a matter of extreme indifference to gamers and billionaire property developers alike. It's such an unfathomable concept that you quickly stop bothering trying to bend your mind around the figures, which harms the gameplay slightly.

Since this is the only real change to the Monopoly Here & Now game, The World Edition feels, ironically, poorer for this unnecessary change. It still plays a great game of Monopoly, but rolling the dice outside The Big Smoke may not be to everybody's taste.

Monopoly Here & Now: The World Edition

A highly accessible conversion of Monopoly reduced to something of a travel brochure by the change of locations
Score
Spanner Spencer
Spanner Spencer
Yes. Spanner's his real name, and he's already heard that joke you just thought of. Although Spanner's not very good, he's quite fast, and that seems to be enough to keep him in a regular supply of free games and away from the depressing world of real work.