Monopoly Review

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Game Description

Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200...Until you've Played Monopoly!

Bring the classic board game to your computer today! Build your fortune through shrewd and careful real estate transactions. Buy, sell and trade railroads and utilities, houses and hotels to get a leg up on the competition and put yourself on easy street!

Monopoly fans: this is the same game you've always loved to play, with tons of exciting new features to make your experience even better.

Excellent 3D graphics and animations bring Monopoly to life as never before

Each part of classic Monopoly - board, deeds, hotels and everything else - is beautifully illustrated with vibrant color and texture. Love to be the race car, battleship, thimble or top hat? With Monopoly, every game piece bounces and slides with its own unique animated movements. Watch out though! Land on the jail square and a police van comes to take you away.

Tons of options to let you play any way you want

Do you like to place a nice cash bonus on Free Parking? No problem! With Monopoly, much of the game is fully customizable. Here are some of the rules you can change:

• Free Parking - everyone's favorite customizable rule, change it so you earn various amounts of cash if you land on Free Parking
• Properties at Start - for a faster game, randomly distribute 2, 4, or all the properties among players at the beginning of the game
• Initial Cash - want so more money to start the game with? No problem!
• House Per Hotel - make it so you only need 3 houses before building a hotel
• Pass GO Salary - give players more cash when they pass Go
• Land on GO Salary - want a bonus for actually landing on GO? Change this to earn more cash.
• Auctions - Turn auctions on or off if you don't want to bid on properties players choose not to buy

Play against other players or by yourself

One of the best things about computer Monopoly is you don't need other players.  You can play against up to 3 computer players at varying difficulty levels.  Or you can play against up to 3 other human players! Or just challenge a friend to a one-on-one game - it's all up to you!

Don't know how to play Monopoly or want to teach someone else?  That's easy with Teacher Mode

If you don't know how to play Monopoly, or you just need to refresh your memory, just choose "Teacher Mode" and the game tutorial will walk you through the rules as you play.  This is a great way to teach Monopoly to anyone, especially kids!  The game is fairly easy to use and almost anyone should be able to get the hang of it pretty quick.

What's cool about Teacher Mode is it will even give you advice on what properties are most landed on and which ones are worth investing in.  That will help you learn a few of the tricks of the game that more experienced players may have figured out.

Don't want a long game? No problem.  Plenty of options to speed it up

Sometimes Monopoly can be a bit long.  Good news, this version of the game gives you several options to make the game go quicker:

• Change the rules to distribute properties among the players before the game even starts.
• Make the game pieces go faster or automatically move to where they rolled with speed up arrow buttons
• Turn animations off to speed up the game
• Turn auctions off so you don't have to bid on unpurchased property

Are you into stats and game records? This version of Monopoly has something for you

Want to know how many turns it takes the average person to go around the game board?  How about which properties and property groups get landed on the most?  What about the most rolled dice number? How about a running record of your wins and losses at the various difficulty levels?  Between Stats and Teacher Mode, all this is here waiting for you.

Exact computer version of the classic board game, only better!

Travel back in time to happy childhood days of Monopoly on the dining room table! This time, however, you can play whenever you want; there's no waiting for parents, brothers or sisters to get home. You can also save particularly long or involved games for later.

No matter if you are an expert or novice, download Monopoly and give it a try right now!

Monopoly Download Features

• All the fun of the regular Monopoly game with tons of added features
• Play Monopoly by yourself whenever you want or play with friends!
• Fun animated game pieces
• Relaxing music
• Professional and colorful 3D graphics
• Many customizable rules - change the game to suit the way you want to play!

Monopoly Review

Living the Dream

Everybody wishes that they could be rich, powerful and capable of moving the world with a flick of their wrists. In the classic board game of Monopoly, we did not need to dream about being important; we simply were. As one of the most widely-distributed games on the planet, it’s only natural that it would see at least several digital editions.

This latest version by PopCap Games is probably one of the best you can find. It includes the official rules, lets you mix things up with some custom house rules, automates the proceedings beautifully, and wraps everything up into an attractive package. It’s not all fun and games though; while it may have most of what we love about Monopoly, it also has most of what we hate about it as well.

Shiny as a Freshly Minted Coin

One common issue that can get in the way of enjoying any computerized edition of Monopoly is the simple fact that it can feel a little stale. Nobody wants to just stare at a digitized board on the screen after all. Thankfully, no one is more aware of that foible than PopCap. The company put a whole lot of work into making Monopoly look good and it shows.

For one, the game does not play out on a 2D representation of the board, but in a fully-realized three-dimensional environment complete with a camera that pans and zooms in on the board for extra drama. Likewise, the tokens don’t just slide around lifelessly, they actually move around like living things. This not only makes the proceedings of the game look more interesting, but it’s incredibly amusing to watch. Every token has its own unique animation that is simultaneously cute and dramatic; even normally inanimate objects like the classic iron and shoe move like they’re about to win a championship.

Other little touches were done to polish the game. The board is a picture perfect representation of the original board we’re all used to seeing. Sound effects were added to make things livelier; noises of construction can be heard when you buy a house, and police sirens will go off when you get dragged to jail.

The best part is how the dice are handled. You can choose to roll them with the press of a button or you can opt to pick them up with the mouse. Doing the latter gives you a greater amount of control over how they can be thrown and rolled. It really helps to make this feel more like an actual board game and not like a cheap digitized simulation of Monopoly.

Play Classic Monopoly

By ensuring that their version of Monopoly feels a whole lot more active than most of the other adaptations out there, PopCap have made the basic and largely timeless gameplay fun. All the standard rules of Monopoly apply. You can buy any piece of property that you land on. Refusing to do automatically puts it on auction. Rolling doubles can get you another turn, but rolling doubles twice lands you in jail. You can develop properties that you’ve managed to monopolize by building houses and hotels on them. You can mortgage properties to pay off debts. You can make direct trades with other players and you collect $200 every time you pass Go. There’s nothing out of the usual here.

If you have not played Monopoly before or aren’t quite as familiar with the standard rules as you may think, which is surprisingly common, then you can opt to play with the tutorial on. This causes message pop-ups from Uncle Pennybags to periodically appear and explain the rules as they apply to the game. Though they can interrupt the flow a little, they’re clear, concise and kept mercifully short. They don’t just explain how the rules of the game work, but they also include some good strategic tips that have been popularly employed in tournament play. For example, Pennybags may indicate which squares are statistically the most landed upon, what the ideal number of houses to put on a property is considered to be, or even how you could use your time in jail to your advantage. It’s actually pretty insightful.

Play Monopoly Your Way

It’s okay if you don’t like the standard rules. Monopoly has always opened itself up to all sorts of house rules. You can alter everyone’s starting amount of cash, decide how many properties they can own at the beginning of the game, play with a limited number of houses, disable auctions, turn the Free Parking spot into a cash jackpot, and so on. It may not be as extensive as what you can do in real life, but the options you do have are pretty good and they’re better than what you’ll likely find elsewhere.

You can further personalize Monopoly by going for the general aesthetics. You can play in one of five different lounges and color your dice in about a dozen ways. There are also three different songs you can listen to while playing, all of which are a relaxing collection of jazz pieces. The library could admittedly be bigger, but at least the game gives you the option to shut them off. In which case, playing your own music is a simple thing.

Taking Advantage of the Computer’s Capabilities

It may not be a physical board game, but the computer format has its perks. As everyone is sure to know, a single game of Monopoly can go on for several hours, if not days. Keeping the board preserved during its “off” hours can be a royal pain in the neck. Meanwhile, computer games like this one can be saved at any time, making long games a lot easier to preserve.

More impressive are the statistics that are automatically kept up to date. Every spot on the board will keep tabs on how often every player has landed on them. Monitoring them can be especially useful for getting a good idea on which properties you should buy and/or develop.

You also don’t need another player to enjoy all that Monopoly has to offer. You can just as easily play the game against some bots. They’re not as good as other players, but all things considered their AI isn’t that bad.

If you can get some other players to join you, then you’re sadly limited to a hotseat game. That’s not the worse thing ever, as Monopoly works best when everyone is in the room. However, some online functionality would probably have been nice.

Regardless of what kind of opposition you would like to face, games are unfortunately restricted to having a maximum of four players as opposed to the board game’s eight. Although Monopoly enthusiasts would argue that four is the optimum number of players, it’s still a shame that our choice is so limited in that regard.

Old and New Problems

No game is perfect, regardless of its format. As a computerized version of a board game, PopCap’s Monopoly is a double whammy as it has the problems of both the original game and its electronic simulation. While this adaptation does a lot to make everything feel physical, it’s maddening when you realize that it missed the mark in one particular area.

You can’t just examine your deed cards like you can in the normal game. In order to look at the attributes of your properties, you have to look at the corresponding tiles on the board itself. It’s not a big deal, but it’s still a terribly inconvenient way to do something that should have otherwise been so simple. It’s even worse if you’re unfamiliar with the board layout itself, as there is no rhyme or reason to how the properties are arranged for anyone who lives outside of Atlantic City.

However, the biggest issue with PopCap’s Monopoly isn’t really PopCap’s fault. You may have played a lot of rounds of Monopoly in the past, but how many have you actually completed? Most people can probably count that number with one hand. A single game tends to last way too long for its own good.

With mortgages, trade deals, and the optional Free Parking jackpot, running another player to complete bankruptcy is just very hard to pull off. Particularly devious players may refuse to trade any properties up for that matter and whole hours could be spent with everyone literally going in circles around the board. It would be nice if maybe someone could just come up with better winning conditions for this 80-year-old game already, but that still continues to elude us.

Conclusion - Capital Job!

However, you can’t really fault PopCap for accomplishing what they set out to do. Warts and all, this is the truest and flashiest version of Monopoly you can get for the computer.

Although being able to play with more people would be nice and some of the interactive elements could use a little bit of work, there’s no denying that this is still a fun and addictive game that can easily be enjoyed against both the computer and your friends. The various aesthetic touches are very nice, the proceedings are fun to watch, and there are plenty of ways the computer format enhances the classic game.

If you and a few buddies of yours still enjoy the race to Boardwalk and Park Place, this is a worthy edition to pick up.

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