My lifelong fascination with Star Wars automatically makes me want to try every single new game bearing the franchise’s license, as long as it comes out on consoles or PC. That being said, I’m the first to admit that, once I heard about Monopoly: Star Wars Heroes vs. Villains, my expectations failed to reach anything beyond lukewarm levels of excitement. For the longest time, I assumed this was going to be just another Ubisoft published Monopoly game with a Star Wars coat of paint. To my surprise, that ended up not being the case. There’s more to this game than I initially expected, but that doesn’t make it any less odd…

It doesn’t push any console’s hardware to any semblance of limits, but it runs well.

So, at its core, it’s still the basic ruleset of Monopoly, sure. You roll dice, walk around the typical square grid, buy property, land of happenstance event tiles, collect more money on the Go space, and might go to jail. But the main goal of the game isn’t to simply amass the biggest amount of galactic real estate. The main objective is to collect more Influence Points than your opponent at the end of a specific amount of turns. Granted, real estate is one of the ways you can collect such Influence Points, but there are additional submodes and actions you can perform to reach said goal. And this is what makes Monopoly: Star Wars Heroes vs. Villains so structurally different from your typical Monopoly match.

This is how a Go space event looks… at first…

Whenever you go past the Go space, you activate a special movie-tied event. By performing a correct dice roll (it will be shown onscreen), you may succeed or fail at that event. Succeeding gives you the aforementioned Influence Points. Regardless of the outcome, you will be treated to a CGI recreation of an iconic Star Wars cutscene, just with uglier versions of your favorite characters, in a “lower budgeted Clone Wars” kind of way. It’s all fully voiced and whatnot, with some characters sounding just like their Clone Wars counterparts (Dooku, for instance, sounds amazing), and some sounding amateurish as all hell. Obi Wan sounds American, for crying out loud.

You are then greeted to a well-put recreation of a classic movie scene afterwards. If you can ignore the ugly characters.

Monopoly: Star Wars Heroes vs. Villains can only be played with teams. If players from opposing sides land on the same space, instead of your typical Monopoly rent script, they will both engage in a battle. It’s as straightforward as deciding the winner based on who had the highest dice roll, but again, it’s a different take on your average Hasbo experience. Kinda banal, kinda pointless, but you are, at the very least, greeted to a cutscene featuring two fighter squadrons, the opposing sides, wreaking havoc. It is more spectacle than substance, admittedly. You can also gain more Influence Points this way.

These slight rule changes make Monopoly: Star Wars Heroes vs. Villains feel more like a party game than the slow, methodical traditional game of Monopoly. That doesn’t mean it’s easily digestible at first, but you will eventually realise this is a faster-paced, shorter, and more innovative take on the traditional Hasbro game. Does this make it BETTER than the original? Honestly, I don’t know. I’d lean towards “no”, but that might just be because I’ve been playing Monopoly ever since I could barely count the money bills I was holding. It’s just… different.

Oh yes. That’s some prime real estate.

I’ll give Monopoly: Star Wars Heroes vs. Villains credit for being more creative and innovative than expected. Just like most people prior to the game’s launch, I assumed this was simply going to be Monopoly with some Star Wars fanservice sprinkled on top. Thankfully, there’s more to it than meets the eye, as it’s actually a brand new way to play a classic game. Whether that makes it BETTER than traditional Monopoly is honestly up to the player. I still prefer the tried and true formula of the classic board game, but I can absolutely see some people appreciating the faster pace and more fanservicey approach of this Lucasfilm coated take on the formula.

Monopoly: Star Wars Heroes vs. Villains is available now on PS5, Xbox Series S/X, PC and Switch 2.

Reviewed on Switch 2.

A copy of Monopoly: Star Wars Heroes vs. Villains was provided by the publisher.