My Singing Monsters is a colorful, kid-friendly pet-collecting game that lets you make music with your virtual pets. Each monster you raise will sing a song, play a tune, or make a beat, letting you breed and upgrade a virtual band!

My Singing Monsters is a 2012 game that spawned a massive franchise of kid-friendly video games, books, board games, and more. The original game is available on Steam, Android, iOS, Kindle, Nook, and PlayStation Vita. In the game, you collect, breed, and raise monsters. Each of these monsters can be placed on your islands, where they’ll happily sing their little monster hearts out.

Singing is at the core of My Singing Monsters. In this case, “singing” does not always involve traditional vocals. Monsters play the drums, vocalize melodies, and lay down backing tracks on all sorts of instruments. Each monster has its own pattern and type of song, meaning that you can combine percussion, rhythm sections, and melodies to create elaborate tunes. Monsters generally sound great with each other, and the game gently iterates monster songs to create music that’s interesting and evocative, even when you listen to it over a long play session.

Over time, you can create islands full of wonderful music. My Singing Monsters is a game about customization and self-expression more than anything else. While it’s not going to replace real instruments in terms of versatility or musical quality, it’s a great way to teach kids the basics of music. Creating islands teaches key ideas about basic song structure, arrangement motifs, and music theory. Many young virtuosos, producers, and composers got their start on early versions of My Singing Monsters in 2012.

In fact, the biggest complaint about My Singing Monsters is largely alleviated by making a small purchase. My Singing Monsters has fairly aggressive ads and incentive programs in-game. Once you’ve spent money, these ads and incentives largely go away. This means that spending $5 or $10 makes the game a lot more kid-friendly and removes a lot of the consumerism pumped into the gameplay experience.

My Singing Monsters is an old game. It’s over a decade old at this point. The freemium model has funded a constant stream of content updates, including new modes, islands, and monsters. This means that the base game can be a bit bewildering to get into for the first time. Luckily, there’s a whole cultural ecosystem of support for the My Singing Monsters franchise, meaning that you’ll never be alone. With ten years of extra content, you’ll never be bored, either.

Overall, My Singing Monsters is a unique take on the pet-breeding and base-building genres that allows creative people of all ages to express their musical creativity. It’s kid-friendly, and while you’ll want to spend a bit of cash early on, it’s quite reasonable to play the game for years and only make a small initial purchase. Best of all, it’s a great game to play in social settings, as your friends can enjoy your musical islands and show off their own creations.

As mentioned above, you’ll want to purchase a pack of some sort very early on in your My Singing Monsters experience. Not only will this disable forced ads, it’ll also give you two breeding structures and nurseries on each island, and upgrade your Mini Mine to produce twice as many diamonds. If you’re going to spend a lot of time on the game, try to make this small purchase sooner rather than later so you can reap the benefits.

In terms of progression, the game does a very good job of guiding your early efforts. Relax, make some monsters, and slowly upgrade and breed them. Try not to level up your early monsters past level 4, however, and make sure you plop unwanted monsters on an island before you sell them. This will save you resources and earn you some extra coins.

If you’re trying to progress optimally, it’s a good idea to unlock islands and wublins as soon as possible. These will help boost your diamond income, which will in turn allow you to upgrade Nurseries and Breeding Structures quickly. This makes hatching monsters faster, which makes your resource engine faster and more efficient. You’ll also want to use these diamonds to upgrade castles so you can have more monsters on your islands. Not only will this let you make more complex songs, but it’ll also let you earn more resources each day.

My Singing Monsters is very much a modern freemium game. It’s got resource management, lots of time gates, and plenty of in-app purchases. When monsters are placed on an island, they’ll slowly generate many of the game’s resource types, but you’ll find that you need quite a lot of resources to upgrade your monsters all the way – and that’s once you have them. Breeding the game’s cornucopia of monstrous musicians is a long process in itself, with many monsters being rare, limited, or otherwise difficult to obtain. 

If you’re after a journey, this is fine. In fact, there are big benefits to My Singing Monsters’ time-gated progression. Kids are rewarded for checking in daily, but resource collection experiences sharp diminishing returns as you play for longer and longer. This means that if your children are spending hours in My Singing Monsters, they’re flexing their creative muscles and building elaborate monster orchestras or checking out their friends’ islands and enjoying their songs. They’ll also learn basic math and budgeting skills while managing their Diamonds, Coins, Relics, Keys, Treats, and Shards. Make sure you’ve set up your devices so that your kids can’t make in-app purchases, however, or you could wind up with a monster bill on your hands.

That said, you shouldn’t approach My Singing Monsters as a “free” app. Instead, it’s a good idea to set aside a small budget to spend on the game after doing a bit of research. Consider spending a few dollars as a reward for chores or getting homework done once or twice a month. If you can, try to do this sooner rather than later, as My Singing Monsters has a fair bit of content that’s unlocked or changed as soon as you make any purchase in the in-game shop.

Are you a My Singing Monsters fan? What are your favorite islands? Do you have a cool setup you’d like to share? Let us know in the comments below!