Monopoly Tycoon Review

Anannya Sen’s Review

A twist on the classic Monopoly where you have to create your Empire. Fun to play but the AI needs a bit of work.

Monopoly is a vastly underrated game in today's world. With the computer and internet era (which I for one have always supported) people tend to overlook the simple and addictive game that is Monopoly. If you want a game where greed and strategy go hand in hand then look no further. Oh, and never let me be the banker.

Monopoly tycoon takes the classic game and adds a twist to it whereby you have to create businesses based on consumer demand and also run them for a profit while playing normal Monopolyesque rules.

The graphics are quite nice and cute. The original character from the Monopoly games is there to guide you (a friendly old gent, I wonder what he's called) and he changes outfit depending on the situation (ie when you are building he's wearing a workman's outfit. The menus are just pure colour in the board game mould and in game the graphics are pretty good. The pieces have been faithfully recreated and although the board is pretty different (and no GO to pass!) again it's done well. On your actual property the graphics are quite nice and people mill about the streets and cars drive around your block. For each building the graphics are different and appropriate and when you construct or demolish the animation looks cool. Definitely a plus point for the game, check out the stations and utility companies.

The sound is a big letdown. There's a reasonable tune when you load the game and on the menus but the in game tone becomes very annoying very quickly. No sounds when you're building or when you're bidding but then again the game doesn't really need them.

The controls are pretty simple, use the D or key pad to move your cursor and press the main button or 5 to make your selection. For the bidding and building the controls are fairly obvious, select the option or building you want to use and press the main button. For the goods sale price use left and right to change the price and this is my only main gripe with the controls. With the low cost goods buildings, the prices are low already so it doesn't take long to press left and lower the prices to what you want. But with the higher goods, eg the car dealer, the price of the goods starts at 500 and the cost 250. So if you want to bring the price down to 300 say, you have to tap left continuously to bring the price down by 1 each time. No holding left to bring the price down at speed and no pressing up or down to move the price in tens or anything like that. This was the one feature they should have improved controls wise.

The playability is great as the game is fun to play once you figure out how to. It can be a bit tricky at first but the basic game is pretty simple. There are different game modes - sales of 5,000 or 15,000 where you have to make this amount, assets or money in 30 days where after 30 days whoever has the most assets or money in the second case will win and finally last man standing where you have to bankrupt your opponents. The game is unfortunately only one player and you play against 2 AI opponents. Shame they didn't make it multiplayer. You start with a set amount of money and have 3 parts to the turn. The first part is where you make adjustments to your buildings such as what type they are and how much the goods cost. You can check the block info to see which types of buildings the public are after. The goods have different costs in each type of building, eg the goods in the grocery shop cost a lot less per good than the goods in the car dealership. But obviously if the goods in the car dealership are so expensive you have a lot more leeway to mess around with the price. This first part of the turn will also let you check out your opponents buildings as well as see in your own buildings what the stats are (ie upkeep costs, number of goods etc). The second part of the turn is where a building is selected at random for you to bid on. You can increase the bids or pull out. You don't have to have anyone bid on a building and even if you have negative money you can still buy it. If you do have negative money for 5 days in a row however, you are declared bankrupt and lose the game. Ok, nearly there now, the final part of the turn is the building part. On this part you are allowed to build a building on your property. You're only allowed to build one building per turn or convert one apartment into a hotel (if you manage to get all three properties of the same colour). They've added a few extra utility companies to make 4 of them like the stations. As you can see there are a lot of modes to play and a lot of options and strategy involved in the game. Overall I enjoyed the game a lot.

The lastability is not that great. While there are so many modes, as mentioned above, it's only 1 player which is a real shame. Also, the AI can be pretty stupid as long as you play it safe and so with no difficulty level to choose I found that I finished all the games pretty easily just by building small and staying alive. The AI opponents just kept bankrupting themselves a lot and I got through each game mode pretty quickly. I did enjoy it a lot, especially the bidding phase as in a few games I got all 3 properties of one colour to convert to a hotel, 2 stations for regular income and some utility companies as well. The game also saves your progress so you can resume it at any time. Shame there's no community chest or chance questions. If they could improve the AI or you could have a longer and more free game mode this would be a brilliant game instead of a pretty good game.