In over a decade of reviewing video games, I have seen the wheel reinvented multiple times. Farming games in graveyards, romance metroidvanias and meta-stories layered on meta-stories, but never have I seen a game try and carve its niche into the centre of such a narrow Venn diagram as Monopoly: Star Wars Heroes vs. Villains. If all of the below appeal to you, feel free to skip ahead to the end and validate your own purchasing habits; otherwise, you may need to strap yourself in.
When sitting around with your family for a game of Monopoly, have you ever wished it was Star Wars-themed? There is, of course, a version of Monopoly for you out there, but maybe that’s not enough – do you want your Star Wars Monopoly to be team-based? How about introducing dice battles and, while we are at it, why not just throw out half of the rules and introduce special abilities? You know what, let’s sack off the board entirely and make the whole thing digital! If this thought has ever crossed your mind, I have some good news and some bad news.
The bad news is that your family are probably worried about this hypothetical game of Monopoly you are dreaming about, given that it’s your turn and you are babbling about Bo-Katan Kryze instead of upgrading your houses to hotels, but the good news is that your dream game is no longer hypothetical. Welcome to Monopoly: Star Wars Heroes vs. Villains, a game I have to reluctantly admit is enjoyable despite two paragraphs of gentle chiding.
Before getting dropped into a round, players are offered a brief summary of the game by C-3PO and R2-D2, which also gives us the first real oddity in how the game presents itself. The language is jarring, ignoring series staples like “sith” or “dark side” in favour of simply “good guys and bad guys”. Even ignoring the language, there seems to be a disconnect between the characters and their movie counterparts – admittedly, I’m reading into this a lot for a Monopoly game, but it doesn’t change the fact that the predominant narration in the game comes from the hollowed-out shells of a well-known droid duo.
Load times were unusually long, and there was an infrequent stuttering or even some minor freezing when it came to switching scenes, but once in the core gameplay, things quickly began to smooth out. The standard rules of Monopoly have been changed to create a team-based challenge, pitting two groups against each other in a battle not for financial stability but instead for influence; the more properties you have on the board, the better your influence is. Likewise, you can increase your influence through certain activities, meaning that every battle and event plays an important part in your rating.
Fights and events have two main types – direct combat and ‘GO! Events’, the former taking the form of a roll-off against an opponent, while the latter triggers whenever you pass the GO! tile. Combat is fairly simple, with the defending player rolling their dice and the attacking player trying to roll higher – the main difference being that the attacker can also try and knock over the defending player’s dice to lower their score, allowing you to take over other tiles or, in the case of certain characters, simply start a battle for resources. GO! Events are, by contrast, much less engaging – despite being framed as game-changing events, they often revolve around the same concept of “roll dice and see if you pass or fail”.
Both GO! Events and combat events trigger one of many animations designed to emulate a well-known part of the Star Wars series, but these often tend to look like bowling screen animations – I half expected a screen about my successful defence of a tile to finish with the word “Spare” in bold letters, which isn’t necessarily a negative, given its endearing charm and the way it matches the classic swiping transitions used throughout the game (another beloved staple of the series), but it was definitely unusual.
Oddly, the game is held up by a solid design foundation, with the slightly cartoonish Star Wars characters backed by a soundtrack that sounds similar enough to the real thing for people not to pay it much mind – there is an amalgamation of elements here that make the game perfectly enjoyable, but it comes at a cost, with the game being less than the sum of its parts.
Throughout each match, the only thought that frequently crossed my mind was how I would much prefer to be playing bog-standard Monopoly. Sure, the variations are fun and add an extra bit of spice, but what it gains in goofy minigames, it also seems to lose in volume – this isn’t Monopoly anymore; it’s something else entirely.
