drdevience's Full Review: Monopoly Tycoon for Windows
Hi. My name is Lori, and I am a Monopoly addict.
Given the above, how was I to resist the pull of Monopoly Tycoon when spotted at an Office Depot for a mere $7.99? I could not. I'm weak. I've spent the last 4 days immersed in the game, much to Lars' irritation. My protestations of but..but... it's research... I have to review it... fell on disbelieving ears. This'll show him! HA!
After getting burned on a few other Tycoon games, I was a bit hesitant, until noticing that this one is put out by Infogrames, the same folks who brought us the utterly amazing RollerCoaster Tycoon series. I figured this hadda be good... and it was.
Monopoly Tycoon is loosely based on the board game of the same name. (If I have to explain the most sold board game on earth to you, then you have no business existing, let alone reading this review. heh.. but you can read my review of Monopoly 3 if you really must.) When I say loosely based, I mean that you do not go around the board gathering properties. What you do is go through various scenarios to build a city whose blocks are named the same as the board game. Boardwalk is of course the premium block to build on, and so on.
So you start off with a short tutorial to learn how to manipulate the views and options, then go into the scenarios. The first is to sell 100 units by picking a block and building various businesses on it such as clothing stores, newsstands, diners, etc. There is an option to poll a neighborhood to see what kind of stores/service they lack. Handy, that.
Your basic stores are open from 9AM-5PM, then you need to have some cinemas, bars, pool halls, etc to suck money out of the greedy little resident's hands. These night based business will run from 6PM-Midnight.
During all this you can bid on leases for blocks, utilities, and railroads in order to reduce your daily over-head (which nails you at 6AM every morning.)
Each time you finish one scenario, a new scenario options appears. Some will require being voted Major of the city by making the citizens happy, some will involve having the most worth by a certain date... like that. Each one is progressively harder and takes longer to beat. Once you conquer the last one, you then get to go into free-play mode, or go back through the scenarios again twice in Medium and in Hard.
Now, I usually don't like scenario play and prefer to go into free-play from the get-go on most games of this genre so I was a bit miffed at first that I didn't have that option in the beginning. Now I'm glad of it. I enjoyed the scenarios so much that I did indeed go back and replay them in the two subsequent modes. I'm wishing there was another round to play in like maybe you wish! mode or something. Ah well.
As to that free-play mode, it kinda sucks. What they did is give you pretty much unlimited funds and no goals or opponents. It would have been nice had they given the option to set goals or add computer opponents into this. I mean, building a city with no obstacles at all kinda sucks the fun out of it, yanno? Bummer, that.
As far as graphics go, this is a very basic game. Most views are 2-D, until you go into a block itself. Then it switches to 3-D with the ability to revolve the screen to have a close up look at what's where. You can click on business built by the competition and see how much they are selling their items for too, and how that's working out for them. AHA! No wonder my book sales dropped off! He's undercutting my prices by 2 bucks. OJ! Best to go in and have a sale, eh? Things are clear enough, but this is not meant to win any CGI awards. It's a time-waster kinda game, not a chills-n-thrills FPS. The graphics, then, are good enough.
The sound effects are pretty much what you would expect in a game like this. You can hear the mumbled sound of a crowded sidewalk, various beeps and what have you to indicate an auction is coming up or whatever, and all through this is an annoyingly constant background score. It's meant to be unobtrusive, but when you're trying to sneak a bit of play in at 3AM while your other half is sleeping, well, turn your sounds off. heh.
So. This is a damn good use of about 8 bucks, but there are some glitches. Well, one glitch.. ok two. After about 6 hours of constant play, it locked my system up. Hard. I mean I had to hard boot my laptop. Grrr. Argh. The second time it did this, it actually gave me an cute error message though and performed an auto-save at the point of crash and let me reboot via Windows. Twice so far the game has just shut itself off without warning, but did not effect the computer itself. You want specs on these issues? Fine. I'm playing this on my old laptop. That's an end-of-2004 machine, playing a 2001 game. This stuff should not be happening.
Still. I have to go with 4 stars overall for Monopoly Tycoon. In spite of the technical problems, this is a highly addicting game. I'm itching to get in and go do the hard list right this minute. It calls to me.... in fact,I think I'll do just that. Buy it. It's cheap.
Build an empire by building businesses, attracting customers, & outwitting your opponents Block by block Outbid competitors at property auctions to as...More at Amazon
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