Everyone has played monopoly at some point in their life, and anyone who enjoys sim type strategy games have probably played Sim City. It was inevitable that some bright guru would combine the two to make Monopoly Tycoon.
Monopoly Tycoon is a simulation game where the traditional fantasy
of "owning it all" is taken to the next level. You come
to a chosen city with nothing but your inheritance and a dream,
to acquire wealth by buying and developing the Monopoly properties
you know and love. Plan, invest, build, demolish, and bankrupt your
opponents in a beautiful, real time 3D environment, populated by
hundreds of citizens who will rent your apartments and buy from
your businesses. Construct a fabulous upscale apartment building
on Park Place or start a department store chain on Baltic or Mediterranean.
It's all about money — and making more of it than your opponents.
You can choose boards from many nationalities so you don't have
to stick with your own.
many nationalities so you
don't have to stick with your own."
You can build up to 44 different businesses from the ground up each with its own style, size, location and type of businesses to operate. You have up to a maximum of five opponents playing against you for the same common goal which means that the game does vary in difficulty and the more scenarios you do the more opponents and strength of opponents increases.
"You have up to a maximum
of five opponents playing
against you for the same common goal "
The Graphics
IT has to be said that the graphics are superb, and the detail really stands out when you zoom down to the city level. As well as looking excellent the speed in which you can rotate the map is fantastic considering the amount of buildings and detail there is.
There are space problems with this game in that you do tend to have a lot of control panel type items on the screen at anyone time and managing them all can be a bit of a nightmare. You can close these panels, but a lot of the time you need to keep a close eye on them to make sure your businesses are doing well, and you are beating your opponents at the scenario.
The Gameplay
On getting this game, I played it non stop for about 5 hours, so it has to be pretty good to keep me occupied for so long. The missions are not really varied enough for return visits to the game on a regular basis as I found on each mission I was building the same things all the time. Once you had a good way to make money, it just had to be repeated on each mission, and you couldn't go far wrong. However not many games keep me so engrossed for so long, so it can't all be bad.
me so engrossed for so long"
The Sound
The sound is very dull and repetitive and probably the worst part of the game in my opinion. The same old building noises and sound effects just got on my nerves after a while. The quality of the sound was excellent though, just a pity sound weren't a little more varied in the difference scenarios.
Overall
This is a very good game and if your a big fan of Sim City type games you may find you'll love this game with its cute graphics, neat game play and array of difficulty levels, but for the extreme strategist, you may find the mission far too similar, and uninvolving. Personally I love this game, great graphics, good gameplay make this a good addition to anyone's game collection. I will warn you though that this game takes time and you could end up with no life.