Monopoly: Star Wars™ Heroes vs. Villains

I'm really enjoying this. I've been playing themed versions of Monopoly board games for years, and this Star Wars version is fun to watch and play. I can exit any cut scene or character moves with ctrl+b when I want to speed things up, so I always feel in control. The game takes care of all the points and game accounting so all I have to do is strategize and watch groovy Star Wars board animation. I find its more fun not playing with AI players. I just manually build teams of Light and Dark side characters and play each character myself building up influence points for both sides while watching how the story unfolds and power shifts as I play.

Monopoly 2024 sucked, for a thesis' worth of reasons, but this new one is worse, solely due to how little you receive in exchange for your hard-earned 30 dollars. I've collected every single Monopoly video game I can get my hands on, and I've played every single console version of Monopoly, so I can say with some authority that this is one of the most BARE BONES release of a Monopoly video game that I've ever seen, especially for a new game on modern platforms. That's impressive, considering the sorry state that Monopoly 2024 released in, for the exact same price of 30 dollars. I pre-ordered this game, fully expecting it to be another train wreck. I was pleasantly surprised in a few ways, so this review won't ALL be negative. I can see a bit of promise here. I will summarize most of the ruleset changes that actually matter. I'm glossing over a lot of tiny things for the sake of brevity like character abilities and such, but I promise you that everything else is so simple, that it isn't worth explaining in detail. - The game is now team-based, hence the Heroes vs. Villains theming. You can play in teams of 2v2, or 3v3. The length of the game is decided by how many GO Events there will be, from 1 to 8. (Explained later.) The new goal is to earn more Influence Points than the other team before the last GO Event happens. - Due to the new team-based gameplay, individual players no longer have their own money. Each team now has a shared budget, which means all players on the same team share the same pool of money. - They removed trading, mortgaging, and auctions entirely. (This is stupid, for several reasons.) - Passing GO now triggers a GO Event for your entire team, and brings the game one step closer to ending. Your team CAN be paid 300 credits, but only if at least one person on your team wins the dice-rolling minigame. - Purchased properties are now owned by the team who bought it. To compensate for the removal of trading and auctions, landing on an opponent property forces you to pay rent, then allows you to buy the property instead. If an opponent is on that space, you'll fight for control over it, via a dice-rolling battle minigame. - The Utilities have been replaced by the Cantina and Canto Bight. The Cantina functions exactly like a shop in Mario Party. In Canto Bight, you can play a die-rolling minigame to gamble your entire team's money away! (Great additions! Two of the very few changes I strongly approve of!) You might've noticed that the overwhelming majority of these new rules REMOVE agency from the player, in exchange for dice-rolling minigames of random chance. With so many decision-making options removed, the result is a Monopoly game that plays exactly like The Game Of Life. You roll dice, and can only make about 5 different types of strategic decisions, total. Well, if the new ruleset sucks balls, then at least you can play with the classic Monopoly ruleset, right? No. There's no classic mode. You can't play with the classic Monopoly ruleset. The only options are how long the game lasts, and whether there are 4 or 6 players. You cannot modify the ruleset in any other way. There is exactly ONE game mode. Nothing else. Need I remind you, this game is 30 dollars. Monopoly on NES had more options than this! F###ing hell, MARIO TENNIS ULTRA SMASH had more options than this, and that game was just NORMAL TENNIS with MUSHROOMS!! The online multiplayer doesn't even have a chat feature of any kind. They implemented cross-platform support and online matchmaking, but you can't communicate with the other players, in a game where you spend most of your time waiting for everyone else to take their turn. That's dumb, but at least it functions, which is a win over Monopoly 2024. (You do have about 16 emotes to pick from, but that's it.) Before I talk about the presentation, PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST, ADD AN OPTION TO MAKE C3PO SHUT HIS GREASY YELLOW MOUTH! I can't stand listening to him ramble and rant every 2 seconds! He keeps interrupting the quips of every character that attempts to speak! This is the exact same problem that the 2008 multi-platform console release of Monopoly had, REPEATED! 18 YEARS LATER! Simply adding the option to make C3PO shut up would be amazing. The presentation is a mixed bag, but it has SOME positives. The game runs pretty well, and the game looks pretty good, for the most part. The visuals are going for an animated Star Wars The Clone Wars look, which was a good choice. Can't complain too much about the visuals, but I wish some of the animations expressed more character. They nailed Darth Vader's walk though, he still struts around like a diva. There are pretty decent animated cutscenes that play, especially for successful GO Events, that recreate scenes from the movies. This is speculation, but I find it amusing that you can easily tell which scenes the developers actually WANTED to add, and which ones they were likely FORCED to add. As you could probably guess, all of the lower-effort scene recreations come from the newer trilogy of movies. Shocker. For the music, it genuinely feels like they didn't have the rights to use ANY Star Wars compositions, and the resulting music sounds like a copyright friendly knock-off. It's not BAD music or anything, it just... doesn't sound enough like Star Wars, aside from a couple of decent Sith themes. I do really like that it'll switch from hopeful and heroic Jedi music, to more intense and aggressive Sith music depending on whose turn it is. That's a great touch, I just wish the music was better. The playable characters are also a mixed bag, equally positive and negative. We were NEVER gonna get the original cast back for the voice acting, but the casting we did get is yet another mixed bag. Some voices sound okay, like Yoda, General Grievous, Obi-Wan (Yes, he says "Hello there!" with perfect delivery), and a few others. I do wanna highlight Palpatine and Darth Maul's voice performances, because I can clearly tell that the actors were having a GREAT time, they knocked it out of the park. However, just like the cutscenes, it feels like you can easily tell which characters were reluctant additions, with especially low-effort voice acting. You don't need to guess which ones they are, because you're probably right. As a side note, I kept swapping between spoken languages during gameplay, and SO MANY of the characters don't have any spoken lines in other languages, and only have spoken lines in English! Even C3PO seems to be missing a few lines in some languages, even though most of his dialogue is fully dubbed otherwise. If it's not just an issue on my end, then I suspect that the developers couldn't find enough voice actors to record dialogue for other languages. Can't wait for the "updated localization files" patch. To summarize, I really hope that they can patch this game. All they'd have to do is add an option to make C3PO stop talking, and add the classic ruleset back in as a secondary game mode, with an option to keep the new Cantina and Canto Bight spaces. That would be awesome, and give me a very good reason to recommend this game. If that never happens, then I blame Ubisoft for, once again, managing to fumble the release of a digital board game. If the game ever gets patched, or if I notice a factual error, you bet I'll be updating my review.

Jako wieloletni fan obu tych marek byłem naprawdę zachwycony tym pomysłem, jednakże jakie było moje zdziwienie gdy po włączeniu gry zamiast tradycyjnego Monopoly z akcentami Star Warsów dostajemy jakiś festiwal tanich, żenujących a zarazem zbyt długich animacji przez zaimplementowany system umieszczenia po jednym bocie w drużynie. Owszem jest możliwość rozgrywki z pełną drużyną graczy, acz jest to ciężkie zadanie bo pomimo cross playa gra z trudnością wyszukuje choćby jednego gracza —przypominam, iż gra co dopiero wyszła. Jedynymi plusami w tej grze jest jej dobra optymalizacja w dniu premiery oraz w miare przystępna cena acz żeby nie było kolorowo jak to Monopoly zauważyłem, iż jest dużo szarej poblokowanej zawartośći z zamysłem jej zakupu lub umieszczenia w płatnych dlc. Jestem z siebie dumny, że wytrzymałem rekordowe 30 minut a zarazem wdzięczny Steamowi za możliwość zwrotu takich crapów. Zdecydowanie odradzam!

Sou fã da saga, mas este jogo é bem desequilibrado. Não tem muita estratégia envolvida e parece que depende da pura sorte mesmo ou da vontade da IA. O único ponto positivo é que a ambientação do universo Star Wars. Fora isso o jogo não compensa.

darth vader

I wish this was more like traditional monopoly with some fresh elements added in. As it is, the monopoly aspects are kind of irrelevant and its these monopoly unrelated GO events that are truly deciding the game. I don't like how others can just take the property that you own if they want it. Also the fact that there are so many AI players taking turns, the game moves really slowly and seems more like you are just watching the AI play itself than playing a game yourself

Its fun.