Monopoly Tycoon 2008

Boardgame sessions always start with the best of intentions, on at least one person's part. Of course, with Monopoly, it will often degenerate into a cringe-worthy spectacle of the unruly sore loser upending the whole board, sending hundreds of the little paper notes into the air the moment they land on a hotel-lined Park Lane for the third time.

With this in mind, it's perhaps safer to play boardgames on your own, on your mobile. Failing that, at least practising on your own a bit will mean you're less likely to be the frustrated sore loser when playing the real-life counterpart. Monopoly Tycoon doesn't offer the traditional board game experience that Monopoly Here & Now successfully attempted, though. Instead, it adopts the structure and some of the rules of the game, grafting them onto a more financially-aware game.

Or that was the plan at least.

This latest version of Monopoly Tycoon is actually rather simple in execution. Play is turn-based and consists of three main repeating segments. The first is the build segment, where you can build, demolish or alter any of the buildings on your properties. The second is the manage stage, in which you alter the 'entrance' prices of your various establishments.

You see, in Monopoly Tycoon 2008 you don't just build hotels and houses as you do in the boardgame. Here you build various high-street haunts such as restaurants, nightclubs and department stores, although you can only fit one on each property. The demand for each type of establishment changes largely at random from turn to turn, and there are frequent special turns where the takings of all cafes might double, for example.

The final section is where one of the unclaimed properties is auctioned off each turn. The property to be auctioned is selected randomly, as is the bidding order of the players (in single-player you're always up against three AI opponents). You only get to make one bid, so if you're outbid, you don't get a chance to raise yours. After each set of segments, you're given a financial break-down of all four players.

There are four main game types: the first to £100,000, the first to £1,000,000, the richest after all properties have been auctioned and the player with the most monopolies once all properties have been auctioned.

Although the turn-based gaming dynamic work reasonably well and means you can get into the action fairly quickly thanks to the decent tutorial, we can't help but feel that the financial element of the game has been reduced to the point where it essentially just becomes a case of gambling. Even compared with the last Monopoly Tycoon instalment, features have been dumbed-down.

The visuals have also taken a hit, too. In an attempt to make everything look a little more cartoon-like and simplistic, everything takes place on a single simple map screen apart from the various building and auction menu screens. Instead of making the game more accessible, this makes things all the more alienating as the city feels less convincing than even that of the boardgame, with buildings mere icons on a charmless Battleships-style grid.

Alas, even constructing more elaborate buildings on your properties offers little excitement. It all feels a little too perfunctory, with only the acquisition of a whole set of one type of property being a moderately compelling prospect.

Monopoly Tycoon does step up a gear once you've spent a while in a single game, but only a couple of the game types will reveal this. Before this point, everything feels a bit too much like blind chance. Although it may sound ridiculous to say this about a game that was based always largely on the throwing of dice, at least traditional Monopoly offers the reassuring visual signposts of the gameboard and dice themselves. Here, the financial mechanics feel like little more than a behind-the-scenes dice roll that you're not party to. Once again, hardly high in the charm stakes.

In short, then, Monopoly Tycoon 2008 doesn't quite manage fill the voids left by the traditional boardgame features it rips out.