As a child we always thought the world of Monopoly was a strange place. The car piece was the same size as the cruise liner and the dog was some genetically mutated strain of Great Dane that was bigger than both of them. Our chocolate stained, runny-nosed face could come second in a beauty contest, apparently, and Mayfair cost £400 when clearly we'd seen it on sale in the newsagents for a fiver.

None of this made much sense, but it was a hoot to build those hotels and nearly win until dad started cheating by pinching hundred pound notes from the bank. One of the great things about computerised Monopoly is that there's no more cheating. You can't stash binary 1s and 0s under the sofa cushion for later use. However, there are some not so great things about this console version of the classic property dealing game.

Such as the waiting involved. Rolling the dice? Then wait three seconds for one of them to settle. A novel dab of authentic physics the first couple of times you see it, but from then on you just want to hit the 'A' button and have the dice roll snap in so you can get on with your go. However, the animation can't be skipped.

Whatever happens on any given turn, Mr Monopoly, a toff with a 'tasche and monocle, pops up to inform you what certain cards or squares do. Now his speech can be skipped, but he still makes a bit of a nuisance of himself, throwing random slight pauses in here and there (unfortunately he can't be turned off completely).

On top of this, the interface itself contains patience-testing issues. For instance, the first time you move the cursor over a button it fails to highlight it, so it's necessary to shift the pointer off the button and then back on to get your click to register. This glitch gets old pretty quickly.

Foot tapping and interface niggles aside, Monopoly provides a reasonable re-creation of the board game. You can play the classic version, with the streets of London, or the more cosmopolitan world edition. This ups the stakes, using world capitals and million pound price tags, and it changes a few of the rules too (the community chest cards and suchlike are all different). However, it's essentially the same game.

If you want to try something really different, there's also Monopoly richest edition, a shorter variant played over a set number of turns which includes various arcade style mini-games. It sounds promising but suffers from a number of problems, not least of which is that it's very luck-dependent. Community chest cards can turn the game around in a heartbeat, which we found more than a mite frustrating on multiple occasions.

We guess this mode is primarily designed with youngsters or family games in mind, involving casual players who won't care so much about such flip-flopping in fortunes. However, the trouble is they'll probably find the mini-games wanting. Some of these are okay, but many are either trivially simple or unnecessarily fiddly. Granted, there's a lot of them, but the programmers would have been wiser to concentrate on a small selection of quality mini-games as opposed to a large variety of dubious ones.

If you haven't got friends to play with, there's no online mode so the only option is to go up against the computer AI. Sadly, it's lacking in any sort of strategic finesse. It's very aggressive in its property buying, which is a fair enough strategy, though it does go over-the-top at times and mortgage itself towards financial suicide.

Worse still, the computer has no real clue about property trading, and when playing against more than one CPU opponent you'll often find that they make dumb deals between themselves. Often one will happily trade the other a property that gives them a monopoly, getting little in return, which can ruin the game.

Verdict
We've done a lot of whinging in this review, and there's plenty wrong with the console version of Monopoly. All that said, there's still some family entertainment to be had with quick games of the richest edition, as long as you don't take it too seriously. The full game suffers from poor AI and it's prudent not to have more than one computer opponent, as otherwise they'll bug the hell out of you by cutting each other stupid deals.

Company: EA

Tags: monopoly board game mayfair london chance and community chest cards minigame rich uncle pennybags games