6½/10 The Lowdown

2/3 Engine    graphics, audio, bells and whistles + sweet 3D engine with lots of the little details ± average music 2/3 Performance    features, speed, stability, bugs + first multiplayer city sim + you don’t have to patch it to play it - poor reporting - weak AI ± functional interface 2½/4 Addiction    “fun”, immersion, replayablity + nice to see the board game come to life + Deep Red provides additional scenerios - requires multiplayer Multiplay ± 2-6 players; Internet (via GameSpy), LAN Developer Deep Red Publisher Infogrames License Monopoly, the boardgame Released 26 Sep 02

Of course, you already know the license. You also know what to expect from a game with ‘Tycoon’ in its title. Monopoly Tycoon delivers on both accounts; a builder set against the backdrop of a fully-3D Monopoly City, not to mention being the first multiplayer city sim.

Taking place in real-time, the game supports up to six players, either human or AI. Victory conditions for the scenarios are varied, ranging from being the first to reach a target Daily Profit to Last Man Standing, where the citizens will vote and kick off the least popular player – sorta like Survivor in the urban jungle.

The Tycoon half of the title consists of building and managing businesses, one of two sources of income; the other being collecting rent. Several options are available for micro-management, including setting how much stock you want to buy (half of leftover stock decays each day) and the price you wish to sell your goods at. A dedicated micro-manager would unfortunately find the reporting system somewhat lacking. You would have to cycle through several buttons to get the information you want, and a lack of summaries means additional clicking, as you would have to cycle through each individual business. Having only one useful hotkey further adds to the deficiency.

You begin each scenario by selecting a character. True to the spirit of things, each of the game’s characters is based upon the tokens from the traditional board game – Dog, Cannon, Timble, Horse – for a total of ten, with each of the tokens having backgrounds and personalities to match. While this makes for a rather interesting backdrop, the lacklustre AI ends up giving you the huge advantage of total predictability. You just know that Cannon is willing to bid himself to death, and that allows you to deplete his available cashflow simply by calling for auctions on properties you don’t even want.

The auction system enables you to take control of a property, for a lease of 25 years (five game rounds). Control of a property allows you to collect rent from any buildings on that land, or save on rent for your own businesses. Monopoly City itself is rather like the traditional game board, with a bunch of blocks for development, the utilities and railroads, and some new additions like an art museum and a school. A nice touch is being able to select which country’s edition of Monopoly you would like to use for the property names, and there’s a long list to choose from. Again, as interesting as it initially is to see the board game as an actual city, because the layout of the city is a constant, you will soon learn which properties are favourable.

The Monopoly itself – when you control all the properties of a certain colour (varying between two or three properties) – allows you to build hotels and to buy over buildings on any of the monopolised properties at a greatly reduced rate. This is a killer, which the AI doesn’t use often enough and doesn’t try hard enough to prevent the player from achieving.

The weakness of the AI is the worse flaw in an otherwise good game. Playing through the single-player campaign, it becomes obvious that the game shares a great similarity with its traditional counterpart – this game requires multiple players (at least if you want an experience resembling a challenge). Beyond the limited AI, the single-player campaign has no backstory, nor any continuity between scenarios beyond the fact that they get progressively harder. You won’t find yourself carefully nurturing a city for forty hours the way you did with Sim City, nor even as long as it takes to complete a scenario in Tropico. Each scenario can be completed in a handful of hours.

Fortunately, with the game’s success, developer Deep Red has been going some way to remedy the single-player experience, releasing patches with more features and additional scenarios through their site.

The question you have to ask yourself is this: “Do I want to take the trouble of looking for other players?” Because if you don’t, pretty soon – like its traditional counterpart – the game will end up forgotten on the shelf. If you do, or don’t mind kicking the virtual @$$es of weak AIs every time you play, then Monopoly Tycoon will provide you with hours of entertainment.

Park Place or Park Lane – you decide