Monopoly Here & Now

We don't quite buy into the idea of mobile board games. Are people really junking their Scrabble or Monopoly sets in favour of sitting round a table passing a mobile phone between players? It seems a bit far-fetched.

But what do we know – board games have been exceptionally popular in recent years, particularly Monopoly. Maybe it's people playing solo to improve their skills, or just whiling away journeys with a familiar game.

And having lurked at or near the top of the charts for a couple of years, mobile Monopoly was in need of an update. Now it's here, called, er, Monopoly Here & Now. And wisely, Glu Mobile has chosen to fiddle with the presentation, rather than do wacky things with the actual game rules.

First, the locations have been customised for Blighty, so you've got Camden High Street, Stansted Airport, St Katherine Docks and so on. Second, the prices have been bumped up, so you're spending millions of pounds, not hundreds.

Glu has also revamped the player counters. So it's goodbye to the boot and top hat, in favour of the coffee cup, labradoodle, RAZR phone and hybrid car.

It's a bit Californian, mind. Couldn't they get Myleene Klass's breasts, a discarded Bacardi Breezer bottle and a vial of Polonium-210 in there to truly capture the UK zeitgeist?

You can play 2, 3 or 4 player games, with other humans – you pass the handset – or against mobile opponents at Easy, Medium or Hard skill levels. You can also tweak the House Rules any way you want, altering how much money you start with, what you get for passing Go, whether you start with any properties and more.

The controls are simple: you move up, down, left and right when prompted, while '5' selects options. Handy too is the option to press the '*' key for a free-roaming look around the board, to see who owns what.

The presentation is suitably slick, with an isometric view of the board, and neat animations of the pieces as they move around it. That said, you'll want to use the '5' key in its second function, to speed up these moves.

The in-game menus are all self-explanatory, and it's all been well thought out – for example, the way you can have a quick squizz at deed cards when deciding whether to buy properties. All the stuff you wouldn't think twice about when playing the real game, but could easily be left out of a mobile version, in other words.

Most importantly, it presents a decent challenge. Cut your teeth on the Easy opponents, then move on to Medium and – if you're properly ninja at Monopoly – try your hand at the Hard ones.

For all our doubts about who'd play the multiplayer mode, Monopoly Here & Now is a polished update that's up there with EA Mobile's recent Scrabble as a mobile boredom killer. Or should that be boardom killer?