Tens of millions of children have grown up with virtual world Moshi Monsters, but the company behind it – Mind Candy – is keen to ensure it stays relevant. How? With mobile apps.
We’ve written about a few Moshi Monsters apps in the past couple of years, but just before Christmas it got a brand new game for iPhone and iPad called Moshi Monsters Village.
It’s not a version of the full Moshi Monsters world, we should add. Instead, it’s a standalone game starring some of its most popular characters. And also important to know is that it’s a “freemium” game: free to play, but making its money from in-app purchases.
The game itself is in the popular build-a-village genre: in this case, the village is populated with cute Moshling characters, with children playing to rescue them, provide for them and decorate their village.
It’s a mixture of resource management and action mini-games, which is polished and playable. Kids can also visit the villages of their friends to see how they’re getting on.
How do the in-app purchases work? Children can buy two kinds of virtual currency with real money: coins for between £1.49 and £6.99, and ‘Rox’ (gems) for between £1.49 and £29.99 at a time.
What we don’t know yet is how aggressive the game is in its expectation of these purchases being made: we’ve seen some that are quite pushy, constantly dangling new goals and content to persuade people to pay, and others that are much more relaxed.
Early indications are fairly good for Moshi Monsters Village – and a 4.5 stars out of five rating on the App Store from nearly 2,500 reviews back that up. We’ll reserve final judgement until we’ve played for a few weeks, though.
We’d advise parents downloading the game for a child to ensure their in-app purchase restrictions are on, and to have had a chat with the child about responsible play.
If you’re comfortable with that, though, Moshi Monsters Village is a free download for iPhone and iPad on Apple’s App Store.
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Whenever I on moshi village it says please try to connect with the internet when the internet is already on
Yeah. I have the same problem as you, Alisha. This is a major issue with this game and my iPad. I have many other games that play fine but this game ALWAYS has connection issues. And for some odd reason, my stone flooring disappears and reappears, then one time disappearing and I ended up having to re-purchase my flooring again, only for it to disappear AGAIN. Aggravating to say the least.
Yeah I’m having the same problem as you two. Most of the time it’s impossible to get into the game without that message coming up every time. I got in once and played for a few minutes and then it said something about glopping my Internet? Never had a problem with my Internet before :/
It sucks…