First off, the Star Wars side of this is a bit of a mess. It features characters from all three movie trilogies along with the various CG animated shows - which means there's a bunch of characters I don't recognize. The visual style is straight out of the CG shows, and looks fine. I guess. The Monopoly board is full of Star Wars locations and cutscenes of famous scenes from the movies play when major game events happen. That seems cool, but is very disjointed and disconnected and only really serves to make the games take longer than they need to. The worst part is the sound - they, somehow, in a Star Wars game, didn't get any of the recognizable music from the movies. Pair that with the abysmal voices for most of the characters that don't sound remotely close to the real actors and you're in for a bad time. This game is surface level Star Wars for the most casual of casuals.
The Monopoly part of the package is somehow even worse. Straight up, it isn't actually Monopoly. It uses the familiar looking board - but full of Star Wars locations and references, of course - and you roll dice to move around, but everything else is different. And worse. The biggest change is that the game is now team based and you play 2v2 or 3v3 matches of heroes versus villains. Your money and properties and overall score are all earned cumulatively as a team. Another change is that the game is over after a number of characters pass "Go" - you can set it anywhere from just 1 to 8. So no matter what else is happening, once the number of "Go" events happen, the game is over. Winning the game is also different because your team has a cumulative score based on how many properties you own and how many of the "Go" events your team won. The whole game can actually swing on the very last roll because "Go" events are worth a ton of points.
What are the "Go" events? They are really just dice rolls based around scenes from the movies. Like, get a roll greater than 7 and the death star blows up Alderran and that type of stuff. The events give tons of points if your team hits the dice rolls, but they also affect the entire board by awarding extra money, or sending opponents to jail, or upgrading properties, or stealing properties from the opponent, or even destroying properties so no one can own them. The "Go" events are total game changers. And totally based on RNG. It makes the rest of what you do feel pretty irrelevant and inconsequential.
Other changes in this version of not Monopoly is that if you land on a property owned by the opposing side, you fight them to control it if one of their characters are actually on the space. Or can just pay to steal it outright if there is no one there to fight you. That's crazy. That's nuts. It can totally swing a game.
Each character also has special abilities such as being able to send an opponent to jail, stealing money every time they pass an opponent, calling in support to buy neighboring properties, or even buying extra dice so they literally can never lose a battle. Honestly, the character abilities kind of suck. Some are very useful. Some are mostly useless. Some feel like totally unfair cheats. None of them are very fun.
The main problem with this game is that everything just feels so random and arbitrary. It is 100% RNG with very little skill or thought required. In real Monopoly there is strategy and negotiation and a sense of risk / reward based on choices you make. In this bastardized version of it, you're just sort of along for the ride at the mercy of dice rolls. And the RNG can be absolutely brutal. One game you will hit literally every dice roll and win by 100+ points - usually because your opponents were in jail the whole time - and the next game you won't be able to win any battles while the opponents are flying around the board with perfect rolls every time. I'll say it again - this ain't very fun.
The worst part is that there are no options to just play classic Monopoly with a Star Wars skin. You HAVE to play the new goofy dumb nonsense version. I can understand the desire to make something fresh and new. I get it. But give us the options to play classic if we want to! That's kind of why I bought the game in the first place - I wanted to play classic Monopoly with Star Wars stuff - so it is very, very, unbelievably disappointing that isn't an option.
I'll just say a final couple of things. I used to love Star Wars, but not really any more. The sequel trilogy is putrid stinking garbage and the Disney Plus shows are mostly trash as well. The prequels stink slightly less. The Star Wars universe is bigger than ever, but the only part of it I'm interested in at this point in 2026 is the original trilogy. Thanks for totally running something I loved, Disney.
The other thing I want to say is that I actually own the original 1996 Star Wars Monopoly set that was a limited numbered collector's edition. It was so cool and people were all like "Hold onto that. It'll be worth money" so, naturally, I opened it and played with it. Lucky for me, those original numbered sets didn't go up in value at all - $50 on ebay as I type this, whoop-ti-do - so I didn't screw myself out of anything. Silly story, but I wanted to share.
To wrap up this mini-review of Monopoly Star Wars: Heroes vs. Villains, I'd have to say it's pretty darn disappointing. The Star Wars aspect is half-assed and lame and the Monopoly part is fairly horrible and not really Monopoly anyway. It's only $30, which is a fine price, at least. Maybe kids that like modern Star Wars and don't care about Monopoly will enjoy it more than us olds. If you just wanted to play Monopoly with a Star Wars skin, though, this is not the game you're looking for. Skip it.
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