From the Vault — originally published January 5, 2011. Some links, videos or prices may be out of date.
In celebration of the 75th anniversary of this popular board game, Monopoly Streets has hit consoles with fun for the whole family.
For those who don’t know, Monopoly involves players moving around a board acquiring property as you go. Each property group is color-coded, and buying the entire group allows you to improve them and thus forcing your opponents who land on them to pay you rent. Your object then is to make the other players become bankrupt, leaving you to clean up the board and win the game.
When you pick your Monopoly piece, whether it be the Dog, Shoe or Battleship etc, they are accompanied by other characters in human form who interact with the pieces as you move around the board, for example the Racing Car Driver will jump into the car piece and drive it round the board on his turn. Again these little additions have been made to make it more fun to play.
Unfortunately though the voices of these characters soon become really annoying as you hear just constant wailing and cheering, and you just wish for a moment they would shut up, especially when you are playing a game that is lasting a while. This review is based on the Playstation 3 version and it’s to my understanding that the Xbox 360 version allows you to use your own Avatars and the Wii your Mii’s, unfortunately PS3 obviously doesn’t have this feature. When you arrive at your destination you have the choice to buy the property, auction it off to other players which begins a mini-game where the person who bids the highest wins the property, or you have the option to trade a property you own for one that is of more use to you from another player. To tackle some of the pacing issues which are definitely present in the game, you do have the option to skip a lot of the moving around the board animations, which is great because sometimes you could catch yourself waiting for your turn for more than 5+ minutes at a time, depending on whether you are playing with the computer AI or family and friends.
At the beginning of each game you play you are given the choice to switch up the rules a bit. Obviously you can choose to play with traditional Monopoly rules or make it a bit more fun and interesting for those involved. For example ‘Jackpot’ rules allow you to improve your properties without having to actually own all the colour groups. Trading can be done with improvements already made and the winner is the first person to double their total worth, and ‘Speed Die’ rules more or less follow the original rules except this time around you have a third die in action which helps to speed up the gameplay and you also begin with more money.
There are 11 boards to play on in total with only 2 of them available from the start. Monopoly City and the classic Monopoly board are readily available to new players. The others require unlocking, and this can be achieved by simply playing through the game, earning Monopoly money and spending them in the store where you can purchase both new tokens and the boards.
You travel around purchasing property. At first the property is just a mere garden, but when you collect all the color groups you are then able to add houses and eventually hotels on to the space which increases it’s value and thus increasing the rent the opposing players have to pay if they land on it, so the visuals become a lot more extravagant. This switch up makes the game a bit more fun and nice to actually look at.
There is also online play that can increase the longevity of the game and it was an absolutely essential inclusion, because for me Monopoly isn’t a game that you should play alone. Sure you have the option here to play just against computer AI, but to me there is no fun in that, and you need the banter of family and friends alongside you to make it a joyous experience. Without it the game becomes boring and monotonous. So with online play you have always got other human opponents to play with and providing they are using voice chat then it would be like you are all sat on the couch together. However, I did notice that when playing online if you tend to be in the lead by a good margin then a lot of players will just drop out. The computer makes up for it and introduces AI players to take their place so you can carry on and claim your victory for the leader boards, but again it’s just not the same experience, so just expect to play a lot of this game alone who you have nobody in the house that you can play with.
The time I had with Monopoly was fun, despite it’s flaws. The fun came mostly when I was playing against other human opponents. Against the computer I soon got bored and shut it off, and I think this may be a problem for solo gamers. That being said, Monopoly is a family game and is aimed towards groups of people you know, so even if you only expect to put the disc in at family gatherings then I say go for it. It is a discount game anyway and there is a lot of fun to be had here, providing you have got people to have fun with.
