Monopoly is one of those games that no matter if you love or hate it, everyone has an opinion about it. The Nintendo Switch is a platform familiar with quite a few different Monopoly titles, and this most recent version of Monopoly goes all-in on trying to replicate the tabletop feel of the classic board game.
The developers at Ubisoft went all in and clearly spent a lot of time and effort to let players throw their own dice, knock over other players’ pieces, or even flip the board.
Generally speaking, most players probably don’t need an introduction to what Monopoly is, but they would rather like to get an idea of how this entry feels and whether or not it could make a good time killer with friends.
Plot Ahoy!
The Monopoly board game has a fun and interesting history. Originally patented by Elizabeth Magie in 1904 as The Landlord’s Game, it was designed to be a demonstration of land-grabbing and its consequences in a capitalist system, where paying rent makes the poor more impoverished while the owners of those properties become wealthier. Created to display these principles and the unfairness of it to children, the game was initially rejected from publishing by Parker Brothers, until just a few decades later when a man named Charles Darrow would claim to have invented Monopoly, which caused Parker Brothers to seek out and buy both patents. They ultimately preferred Darrow’s game and started to sell that version. The claims get a little murkier after that, but Monopoly would go on to become one of the bestselling board games throughout the entire world.
Review Notes
The latest version of Monopoly from Ubisoft, Monopoly 2024, plays precisely like the game everyone knows and loves, and it allows players to manipulate the dice to knock over a friend’s tokens when losing. Monopoly 2024 fixes some of the rule oversights that were present in Monopoly Plus or other iterations, such as when you couldn’t manage your properties or trade when landing on a space you couldn’t afford. There are plenty of rules you can change to make the experience as fluid or as excruciating as you want, so if you want to enable multiple house rules, such as collecting extra cash on free parking or giving someone a thousand dollars for rolling snake eyes, that’s something you can totally do if your goal is to make Monopoly’s gameplay take significantly longer.
The extra features in the latest edition of Monopoly are pretty neat, and they mostly affect the aesthetics of the game board. The city feels much more alive in this version, which makes the board busier and more interesting to look at. The weather can change, so occasionally players will be wheeling and dealing in the rain, while at other times, they’ll have a lovely day filled with sunshine. Cars will drive along on the roads in the background of the board, and there’s even a day/night cycle system to change the time of day. It’s pretty nice to look at everything going on in the background while you’re feverishly trying to convince your spouse that it’s okay to trade you the orange property she holds, and you promise it won’t come back to bite her later (it will).
Players can roll the dice themselves and can move their piece along the board rather than it solely being automated. There are a lot of different token pieces to choose from, and you can unlock a ton more by simply playing or wandering through the 3D city landscape to find the top hat, for example, which unlocks that piece. And if you don’t like the fact that you’ve landed on Park Place and have a ton of rent due, you can also choose to flip the board for some mild catharsis. Of course, Monopoly restores the board shortly thereafter and you’ll still have to pay the rent owed, but it’s a novel feature the first few times the button is pressed.
All of these extra animations come at a cost of time. Some of the design decisions in this version of Monopoly were made to better emulate the board game that is being played, but many of them make game actions take significantly longer to resolve. Thankfully, players can speed up a lot of these actions with the press of a button, though CPU character turns seem to still take quite a while despite being nearly instant in previous iterations of Monopoly.
Compared to previous versions of Monopoly, the current version is very stable and doesn’t randomly crash like Monopoly Plus did on the Nintendo Switch, like all the time. If you do still have a crash with Monopoly 2024, there is an auto save feature to help maintain progress across turns, hopefully preventing any large data loss. We did, interestingly enough, encounter an issue where an AI player got itself stuck in a recursive loop while trying to manage its properties, leaving us unable to progress the turn, but thankfully resetting the game fixed that particular problem without it ever cropping back up again.
TLDR
The newest iteration of Monopoly is visually appealing and plays exactly as you’d expect. Finally being able to select more than one house rule in a Monopoly game is likely something that will be enjoyed by a large number of players. Monopoly, in its new digital form, is perfect for killing time with friends and family, and this edition has cross play online multiplayer, though the online is a little less active, so you may need to source players from something like Discord. Alternatively, you can force your spouse to play with you too because sometimes everybody needs to air some grievances.
Developers: Ubisoft
Platforms: Epic Games Store, Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, Steam, Xbox One