My Singing Monsters Playground, developed by Big Blue Bubble and published by Sold-Out Software, offers a variety of minigames for players to enjoy. Four monsters compete to win in either a free-for-all, two-on-two, or three-against-one minigame. Players can also unlock decorations and alternate skins by earning Relics while playing.
My Singing Monsters Playground has various minigames similar to Mario Party Superstars. There are a total of 25 minigames to play with either with AI opponents or other players. Each game starts with instructions and a practice window so players can test out the controls. Unfortunately, the controls lag occasionally, which makes games that require specific timing a bit difficult to win. In "Hazardous Hurdle," players need to jump over a fast spinning bar, but the jump action doesn't always work, while other challenges, like Tobog-gone, just have counterintuitive controls that make the minigame feel broken.
Although My Singing Monsters Playground is the successor to the original My Singing Monsters game, there isn't really any singing done by the characters. Players familiar with the game will recognize the instrumental background music as some of the songs the monsters sing, but that's the only connection. There are also just seven monsters to choose from, and a few of the other characters are featured in minigames. Players can get different costumes for the monsters, but there are no additional characters to unlock.
Relics can be earned while playing to randomly unlock decorations or costumes, and each monster has six alternate costumes to unlock. There are a lot of monsters in the original game, but My Singing Monsters Playground, like Mario Party Superstars, doesn't include unlockable characters. This seems like a missed opportunity to give players something to work towards, as the prizes don't feel like they're worth the effort in their current iterations.
Relics are earned while playing one of three available game modes. In Tournament mode, players will choose the number of games in the match and compete to win the most gems. First, second, and third place are awarded three, two, and one gem, and the player with the most at the end of the tournament wins. There are also bonus gems at the end of the tournament awarded for random feats, like standing still the longest. Once a game is played on Tournament mode, it will be unlocked for Free Play, a mode that allows players to choose each individual game.
Free Play is a great mode to practice on before attempting the Solo Gauntlet mode. In Solo Gauntlet, players are challenged to compete against AI opponents and must come in first place to move on. The goal is to see how many games the player can win in a row. The Solo Gauntlet is a good way to test skills and get used to the more powerful variants of AI rivals. AIs become drastically more difficult as they scale up between easy, medium, and hard. However, the difference between easy and medium is much greater than medium and hard, which makes the difficulty levels feel somewhat unbalanced.
My Singing Monsters Playground invites players to use some of the most popular monsters from the mobile game to compete with their friends in a variety of minigames. Alternatively, players can battle against AI opponents in one of the three available game modes. Although there's a lack of monsters or unlockables, My Singing Monsters Playground is still fun to play and has enjoyable references for fans of the original game.
My Singing Monsters Playground releases today, November 9th, 2021 for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, and PC. Screen Rant was provided with a digital Nintendo Switch download code for the purpose of this review.