Monsters Love Gum is a fairly interesting iPad title, but not one that will hold your attention very long. If you’ve played Hungry Hungry Hippos, you’ve played this game. You’ll also know that Hippos is the original “button masher” game.
If you haven’t played the original board game, here’s a quick break down: Four players sit on each side of the table. Marbles are dropped into the play area, and you mash a button to get your hippo/alien to eat them. Whomever gets the most once they run out is the winner.
Monsters Love Gum isn’t too different. You have different monsters to choose from, all balanced on how fast they are and how long their reach is, and you compete to collect colored marbles. To add in a bit of variety, you can also drop weapons like bombs and electrified marbles to impact the other monsters. You can play with up to four players on one iPad, which is nice, and for each less than four, it will be filled in with computers so there aren’t any dead zones.
The game is essentially nothing more than hitting the button as fast as you can. Though, the weapons are a nice touch, but there’s no way to aim or avoid them. You’ll still get hit by them even if you don’t actively pull them in toward you, and can be hit by your own if they just wander your way.
The game features three different modes: Battle, Hoarder, and Disco. Each can be played as sudden death, or the best of 3 or 7. In Battle, you just compete to see who can get up to a certain number of marbles first. In Hoarder, you’re looking to only collect certain colored marbles, and your number will go down when you get the wrong color. Disco takes Hoarder up a notch and makes everyone randomly switch colors frequently.
In Conclusion
This may be a good game for young children, and I mean very young, but for most people, I just can’t recommend this. The gameplay needs several tweaks to improve this title before it’s worth the investment. Monsters Love Gum is actually free TODAY ONLY, so if you have some very young kids at home, you might as well grab a copy and see what they think.
