My Singing Monsters on Vita is a port of a mobile title. In it, you breed monsters who well… sing. While the title is free to play, you can pay real money for a variety of things. If you don’t, get ready for waiting… and a lot of it.
Like pretty much every free to play title out there, My Singing Monsters relies on timed events to make things happen. For those impatient folks, you can use an in-game currency of diamonds to speed up various processes. To get these diamonds, you need to pay real money. You can get some from goal rewards but the ones that give you any are few and far between. So in other words, be ready to wait. If you wish to collect any amount of monsters without spending anything, you will need to invest a LOT of time into the game. Note that you can also get some diamonds (not very many though) each day by using your daily free play of the “Memory Game.”
Besides diamonds, there is another form of currency – gold. While, again, the option to just purchase this with real 
money is there but it isn’t the only option. Over time, your monsters will produce money for you. Each one has it’s own cap and how high that cap is will depend on how happy it is and its current level. I’m just glad there’s another option for coins besides real money, and that it’s reliable.
To level up your monsters you need to feed them. To feed them, you must bake food. To bake food you need to purchase it and yes, you guessed it… wait. Well of course, you could choose to speed it up or just buy the food itself with real money. There are several tiers of food with varying speeds. The fastest ones will produce the least amount of food but are the cheapest. The more expensive ones will give you more food but take much longer to make. You are best off finding the one that works for you that will help you maintain a steady income off your monsters. Personally, I chose to make lots and lots of donuts. I’d say my poor monsters but considering the higher tier items are things like pizza…
To actually GET new monsters you need to breed them, or well of course you could just buy them with diamonds (in other words with real money). All monsters are thankfully available through breeding so you don’t have to worry about that part. The amount of time it actually takes to breed these monsters is insane (some take 36 hours, and you have to do that TWICE!) which really drives home the whole “pay to get it done faster” part.
To raise a monsters happiness you can do things that actually don’t involve real money! You can place them next to other monsters that they like (this information can be found in their information section under likes), or you can place them next to decorations they like. Of course, the “Likes” tab doesn’t say everything they like! You’ll have to do some experimenting (or look it up online, I suggest the fantastic My Singing Monsters wiki) to figure it all out!
There are several islands available for you in My Singing Monsters. For the first while you will only have access to the first island, but once you hit level 10 others “open up” to you. Well, sort of. Gold and Ethereal island do open up to you, that’s for certain. Good luck getting anything on there though! You cannot breed on Gold island and you can’t transfer a monster to another island until level 15. Besides those two, there are various other islands that you can purchase for gold. I personally suggest building up your first island for awhile before you even consider purchasing the second island, Cold, which costs 200,000 gold. I suggest this so that you can be sure you’ll be able to bounce back from such a large purchase!
While My Singing Monsters is something that’s fun to open up every now and then to feed things, get your money, or make more food, the incredibly long wait times kill it. Yes I know, it’s free to play, you can always pay your way through. However, for those of us who aren’t rolling in millions of dollars to do so, the wait is pretty much your main option. So if you are interested in a small time investment with a little micromanaging (especially with breeding creatures!) then you should grab My Singing Monsters off PSN for free now.
My Singing Monsters
3/5
Stupidly long wait periods to breed monsters, you’ll likely have a waiting line in your breeding machine trying to wait for the incubator to open up. Overall, the required time for most everything seems to just be a little too high.
