As a non-american kid growing up poor, the only tabletop board game I knew was Monopoly for a really long time so I'm gonna compare this game to it a lot...

First of all I have no idea how the actual tabletop board game plays, the review is purely about this release so let's start by describing the game:
•The game can be played up to 4 player in singleplayer, local multiplayer or online multiplayer (no matchmaking, only with friends) mods.
•The game's goal is finishing the game with the most earning by any means. What does this mean? When the game ends the earnings get summed up by selling the houses you bought (if you had any), also you get paid per kid you had (if you had any), and the players get paid for finishing the game (1st getting the most and the 4th getting the least).
•There are some turning points on the board that you have to pass and make a decision:
--College or Career: You start the game with this by either select a job and throw yourself into life or selecting the college route, pay a loan but in the end get a better paying job selection.
--Getting Married: You select a husband or wife to your character.
--Night School or Life: You can go the night school route if you wanna change your job.
--Family or Life: You can go to family route for better chance to have kids but even if you miss them the route guarantees you at least a kid in the end anyways.
--Risky or Regular: Risky route contains good paying tiles but it also has some tiles that makes you lose money.
•Other than these special spots, apart from Payday tiles the board is mostly just Action tiles which is just a spin-the-wheel thing (sadly the 90% of the game is spin-the-wheel) or rarely Have Kids, Buy a House, Minigame tiles. There're only 2 very easy to win against cpu minigames.
•Unfortunately you can't play minigames with local-multiplayer because you play the game with just the mouse and that mechanic doesn't let your mouse to be at 2 different spots to play the minigames (or by just sheer luck nobody got to a minigame tile when I played a player-player-cpu-cpu game).
•A full game of 4 players takes around 45m-1h. There is a "Fast Play" option which has 4 different options to finish the game: Reach 1500K, Reach 750K, Reach Marriage Chappel or Get 5 Action Cards.

Now comparing it a little bit to Monopoly:
•This game feels childlishly friendly. There's no way you'll lose money at the end of the game and most of the spins ends up with you earning money, also the ratio of earnings vs losses are very high. You even earn money on other players' turns regularly because of cards like "Everybody Spins" or "Choose an Opponent" which literally all the cpu players will choose you every single time (I guess because the devs didn't want you to get bored by watching 3 cpu play their turns or something...). It just feels like a game of "Number Go Up", we're all going to earn a lot money but we'll see who has the most in the end.
•The game definitely doesn't feel hostile between player like Monopoly! When you lose any money it's mostly just paying the bank or when you win a spin against other players it is still the bank that pays you. The most common way to lose money to other players is if you spin the number of their jobs, for example if you spin a 4 to move on the board and someone has the athlete job you pay them money (for some reason... it's a weird "Pay a lease" system).

All in all I think it's still a cute game that you can play (especially with your kid maybe but why play this when you can actually play the real thing?), I think it's just missing that heated action that Monopoly has and this version is hugely lacking diversity with only 2 minigames or how most of it is just spinning a wheel...

PS: I'm pretty much done with this game but if I play more or remember something that I missed, I might maybe update this review...


I played this game thanks to duhnuhnuh's Perpetual Steam Game Giveaway !

"In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state."
I've got this from wikipedia

I've booted this game up expecting a short, sweet, side-scrolling, puzzle platformer game but on top of those I've found a deep and kind of a tragic story and twists...

•The game starts with a quick and simple run down of the story and the goal of this little cute machine.
•Right of the bat, the atmosphere is great! The good lovely melodic music that started in the main menu continues in every room with different themes. Cute graphics of being a little machine inside of a regular home where everything looks big and supporting that with many nostalgic items gives you the feels (if you're 30+ years old). The style of graphics works with the environment and items really well but not as much with the living beings in my opinion.
•The game play is good, nothing fancy but it works well. Our little robot's movement is really satisfying to watch for some reason: Going through tight spaces so effortlessly, always landing the same despite wherever/whenever/however the jump is, passing obstacles by driving over them, even when you're just going to left or right in an empty area those tires turning is just hypnotizing...
•Only bad thing about gameplay I can say is whatever mechanic you do with your LT/L2 button (you either throw stuff with a dotting-line aim that is not really accurate or throw a grappling claw and launch yourself to what feels like random places instead of where you aimed), for some reason I've found that incredibly janky and having the literal last section of the game for just that button's mechanic made it a bit frustrating for me.
•A couple of other bad things (I'm just nitpicking actually): If you're not hit by nostalgia you will realize quickly how messy this house actually is and wonder what so many random items doing in that part of the house. And despite liking the music, out of all those sections of the house in all 3 Acts, one room's music felt really short and repetitive so it annoyed me (I don't even remember what part was it right now). And sadly the robot may feel a bit slow after sometime...

Lastly something that needs to be mentioned: You may observe that the game being a bit short but the game has 3 main and 1 secret ending. I think most people just play the game and get what I would call "Replaying Encouragement" ending instead of the good or the bad ones and go watch the other endings on internet. The game does a good job on there and doesn't bore you with a complete replay. A really good divided Chapter Select menu will appear where you can just load certain sections of the game to change stuff or do the things you missed and after you get a checkpoint/save you don't even need to finish the section, you can go to Chapter Select menu again and go future sections to see the impact or just can play the very last section again to see if you've got a different ending. You just need to know where to go or what to do...


I played this game thanks to duhnuhnuh's Perpetual Steam Game Giveaway !