It is Monopoly, but it hurts to play it.
Monopoly: Here and Now Worldwide Edition is a decent game. It plays like your Monopoly board game that you stashed in your closet because no one wants to play you in Monopoly, and really, you don't want to play anyone in Monopoly either. Monopoly is a slow, painful board game in which the last 20-30 minutes or so of each game involves one person crying as he slowly hands his money to his opponent.
Monopoly for the Xbox (Sorry, I'm not going to use the huge title, nor will I shorten it to Monopoly: HaNWE because that means nothing.) is basically only Monopoly for people who either A: can't count all that money out themselves, B: Don't want to count all that money out, or C: Want to play with computer opponents. The game's UI is slow and terrible. Tons of animations are completely unskippable, which sounds like a bad complaint, but sometimes you will sit there for upwards of 3 seconds while the game loads and then plays a 3 second animation of the monopoly guy shaking his fist and saying "I wonder what will happen next!"
I want to skip that. I just want to play Monopoly. Trading, dice rolling, character movement, they all take about six times as long as they should, especially when you have already seen the animation hundreds of times that game.
The UI literally throws a cursor on the screen for trading. I can't think of the last console game that did that to me, but isn't that a sign of laziness? Everything you are trying to click on is still too small to be able to touch easily.
The weirdest and most frustrating addition to this game is the Richest edition game mode of monopoly. This is an almost Mario Party-esque mode in which players take part in a minigame, then they are awarded a pick at four rolled dice which then get them the given number of Tokens on random spaces of the board. This game boasts that there is "no money!" as if that is a good thing. All that means is that, in all rounds after the first round, you pay rent in properties. The final goal is to have as much value in properties as possible at the end of how ever many rounds you play.
Everything is roughly random. There are ways to do better or worse, but by no fault of your own you could go from first place to last place in the last round. That also means that if you are super lucky, you can go from last place to first in one round. Really this drains the fun out of the game and just makes you want to punch the people next to you, or throw your Monopoly disk out the window if the computer players pissed you off.
Back to my annoyances with unskippable animations, Richest treats ever game you play as the first one you have ever played. It will run a tutorial video (thankfully, skippable) and it will read every text box out loud before the "OK" button shows up. The game just wears out the player in all the wrong ways.
It is Monopoly. I like Monopoly, but at the same time, I have played better versions on my old Windows 98 PC. Versions where I had a cursor anyways, where I could skip reduntant cutscenes, and where I could pass and play just as easily.
