There are bad games, there are terrible games, then there's this
Being a man in his 30s, I remember with great fondness nights spent with both family and friends playing Monopoly, but the board-game variety. Sure, most of the games ended with someone screaming out expletives and flipping the board, but it was fun nontheless.
There's been a few different iterations over the years to try and recapture the board game in digital form and now EA have tried it again with Monopoly Streets. There've been many board-games that have made the conversion from board-game to video-game, and have done so quite successfully.
Monopoly Streets, however, is not one of those examples.
From the very beginning, Monopoly Streets has a great customisation base. Just about everyone has their own rules when playing at home, and MS have definitely taken this into consideration, and just about every rule variation is catered for here, you can really customise it to your specific Monopolistic desires.
As well as the rules, there's also a few different variations on the board theme. There's the actual 'streets' which is a 3D representation of the board, and a few other themes, which change the appearance, and customise the property names - for example, there's a "Sweet Board", which has a popular lollies and sweets as the property names. The only unfortunate thing is that this is the US version, so it could well be that I haven't unlocked it yet, but I'm yet to play with the UK version that I'm used to playing.
The other part you'll recognise are the character pieces. Most of them are here, but not all. For some rather frustrating reason, you need to unlock those pieces as you go along, so the game requires lots of playing time to unlock everything. As well as the classics like the battle-ship, the boot, top hat, dog, wheelbarrow and others, they have their own little avatar that goes with them, and oh my god are they irritating. It would've been slightly less annoying if they were just randomised xbox avatars, but they're not. They're weirdly drawn characters to go with the piece (for example, the racing car has a character that's a race-car driver), but they're completely out of proportion to the xbox avatars, so if you choose to use your own avatar rather than one of theirs, then it looks quite odd. The avatars also speak some kind of odd Sim-lish language which is annoying enough to have you putting the tv on mute in the first 2 minutes.
What then continues is a adventure of boredom, annoyance and utter frustration. Seriously, I cannot say enough bad things about this game. It's not that the game is bad (even though it is), it's just completely unnecessary. EA are already doing their "Family Games Night" with a bunch of other Hasbro and Parker Brothers games, and they seem to be working fine, yet I don't understand what makes them think that Monopoly is suitable for it's own disc release.
I could go on and on about all the bad points of this game, but it's tiring and predictable. All you need to know is that this game is completely and utterly unnecessary. At every point of this game it makes me grow more and more irritating. Whether it be the needless animations between turns, or the frustrating pointlessness of attempting to trade with AI players, the lack of online players, or just the sheer monotony of the game, this isn't a title that I can honestly recommend to anybody.
This is quite possibly one of the worst games I've played in years - and I've played the Zumba game.
PROS
- great in-depth customisation on the rules
CONS
- everything else about this game
SUMMARY
There's nothing about this game that's worthy of purchase. If you're really wanting to play a game of Monopoly, buy the board game. Or if you don't want to spend the money, just come to my house, I have a copy in the cupboard.
