Monopoly Here & Now: The World Edition

Power-mad property tycoons screwing the little people out of their money, then gambling it all on foolhardy get-rich-quick schemes. Home-owners having to sell off everything they own to pay off mounting debts. Corrupt bankers awarding themselves unearned “bonuses” on the side.

You’d be forgiven for thinking the world has turned into a giant game of Monopoly.

The key difference, at the risk of trivialising people’s misery, is that Monopoly is brilliant fun. It’s the king of boardgames, the ultimate game of risk and reward.

It’s also a brilliant fit for your mobile phone, as evidenced by a couple of excellent conversions from EA. Now, Monopoly Here & Now: The World Edition (to give it its full word count-busting title) has made its way to N-Gage, ready to corner the market on classic boardgame interpretations.

For those who haven’t yet played one of EA’s mobile Monopoly titles, they go a little something like this: You pick your playing piece, your opposition (up to three AI or human players) and any additional house rules (such as increasing the initial cash or altering the auction procedure), then set off into the game.

The board is viewed isometrically, and as each player takes his turn (the dice being rolled automatically) the little playing pieces scoot off in a manner befitting their stature.

This being a modern update, the vintage racing car has been replaced by a London taxi, which chugs off in true cabbie style. Well, maybe not true cabbie style - that would involve driving the wrong way around the board, cutting across the middle and hurling abuse at the other playing pieces.

There’s also a sumo wrestler, a set of Russian dolls, a penguin and a few others - all in keeping with the internationally themed update, and all with their own charming animations.

Elsewhere, this modern revamp changes the very locations you’re used to wheeling and dealing in, so train stations become space stations and London streets turn into world cities.

As we pointed out in our mobile review, this change is a little jarring, as it renders the whole concept just a little too abstract for its own good.

For all its casual appeal and relative user-friendliness, Monopoly is the ultimate role playing game - loving couples become bitter business rivals, mild mannered grans turn into ruthless scrooges.

Asking you, then, to buy the teeming metropolis that is Tokyo in order to build a hotel on it just seems to shatter the illusion a little.

Still, that’s a fault with the license rather than the core game. Mechanically, World Edition is as sound as it ever was on mobile - there’s the same vibrant presentation and the same fluid and intuitive trade-menu screen for proposing and countering deals. In fact, all in all, it’s possibly a little too ‘the same’ for its own good.

Changing a winning formula can be suicide, and we’re certainly not expecting EA to rip up the successful mobile Monopoly handbook just for N-Gage. But we’re a little disappointed at how little EA has enhanced this particular winning formula.

Let’s run through the perceptible changes. As mentioned in our previous news item, the sound appears to be far richer here than in the mobile versions of Monopoly - the extra space afforded by the N-Gage platform allowing for more varied and better quality effects.

Then there’s the default landscape view, which looks attractive, but barely enhances the experience one iota over its portrait-predecessors.

Which leaves us with the N-Gage Arena functionality. An online multiplayer mode here would have represented a considerable step forward, and we could envisage playing some kind of streamlined, time-limited online mode until the cash-cows came home. But there's none - only an online rankings board.

Of course, if you’re jumping on board the whole mobile gaming train afresh with your spangly new N-Gage phone, none of this will matter. World Edition is excellent fun, and there’s nothing else quite like it on the platform.

But those of you who, like us, are aware of N-Gage’s place in the wider mobile market will probably feel like this is a grade-A property situated in a prime location which has received a slightly half-hearted renovation.