Monoply GO is Trash

I'm a big fan of the board game, Monopoly, so naturally I had to try out Monopoly GO.

To put it simply and bluntly, I have NEVER played a video game SO DEVOID of choice and depth until now.

Monopoly, the board game, is already a game with minimal meaningful choices. Yet they somehow still reduced it to a level of meaninglessness more comparable to Life, War, Go Fish, or even Rock/Paper/Scissors.

Everything "satisfying" about this "game", and I call it those things begrudgingly, is an illusion.

It gives the illusion of choice, because the choices it does give you, such as picking which landmark to shutdown or choosing which cards to turn over in a heist, are meaningless ones because your choice has absolutely no bearing on the result, as it is entirely luck.

It gives you the illusion of progress, because the milestones you hit, like finishing a city-board, don't actually reward you with or progress you to anything new whatsoever. You simply just get another cut & paste city-board to complete. There is absolutelty no dynamic to be found from milestone to milestone.

"Hey wait, prices rising is technically a dynamic"

Is it really, though, considering that your income seems to scale up equally with each milestone?

And finally, when the illusion of choice and the illusion of progress are at work simultaneously, you get the illusion of depth.

The cherry on top is the fact that the game has no long-term goal or endgame outside of collecting "stickers" as well.

The only real meaningful decision to make in this game is to spend money. In fact, from a business perspective, that's fucking BRILLIANT.

This game is the epitome of "brainless" as far as video games go. Even with the vast majority of the worst games I have ever played, I can balance my criticisms with at least ONE positive thing to credit them, but not this one. This game just sucks, all the way, through and through. It's a mindless "red button masher" for simpletons.

What is really saddening is that there are at least a few decisions that the game makes for you that WOULD give this game some depth if it let the player make them instead.

Let me choose where to put my houses & hotels. Then give those choices risk vs reward.

Instead of three universal shields, make me choose which landmarks are shielded and which aren't.

Scrap the entire heist feature that is basically just Go Fish with a random result and replace it with something that has actual risk vs reward.

Of course, none of that will actually happen, because after all, this game has already made Hasbro literally a billion fucking dollars already. It is testament to the sheer magnitude of braindead zombies out there so easily parted with their money.

Now excuse me, I'm going to go back to refraining from playing mobile games altogether, as they continually prove to me that they always suck.