While feeding my recent addiction to Hay Day, I ended up watching an add for My Singing Monsters for about the hundredth time - but unlike my typical mode of operation I had the sound on. The "monster music" was catchy, so I decided to give it a try. The result was an unfortunate mixed bag. Read on and I'll break it down.
Configurable Monster Acapella... Obviously
My Singing Monsters starts with the sound off is basically a reskinned Dragonvale. You start on an island that is a mess of trees and rocks (where are the groundskeepers of these floating islands?) and you have a few basic monsters in place to start you off. The real magic of the game, as one might expect, is with the user built "monster music track" that results from which monsters are present, and whether or not they are muted. Some monsters create more percussive sounds, some baseline, and there are plenty of little "doo-wops" for variations on melody. The song is quite infectious, and sometimes it still haunts me.
Mechanical Dissonance
That might be a term I just made up - you heard it here first. Anyway, the huge downside to the creative possibilities of My Singing Monsters is that these possibilities are immediately and harshly stifled by aggressive microtransactions. At this point agent86ix and I have been around the old micro-merry-go-round, and so when I say aggressive I mean aggressive. I felt like I had barely loaded the game before there were monsters pawing through my wallet and asking for the CCV on my credit card. In another universe I can imagine that Dragonvale and My Singing Monsters got switched at birth - in such a world My Singing Monsters with "lite" micros might be a game that I'd find hard to put down. As it stands I guess I'm left wondering.
My Singing Monsters hits some high highs and some low lows, but overall a really cool game concept is marred irreparably by abuse of F2P microtransactions. The core idea has a lot of potential, and I wish there was a way I could buy it for less than infinity dollars.