Tidy Monsters: Pick up After Yourself – Review

I notice there seems to be a formula for creating an appealing mobile game. Cute characters plus addictive arcade gameplay with a dash of incorporating the touch screen into your game, and I’ll say right off the bat that Tidy Monsters by Top Bubble does all of this pretty well. You play either as a duo of monsters, or perhaps someone aiding the monsters and your objective is to organize your toys into sets of three. I’d almost describe the gameplay as sort of a mixture of Bejeweled and Tetris. Toys fall from above, and you can drag any toy you’d like into the box below. Once you get three of the same toy in the box, you can send it off and begin anew.

It has a really nice flow to it, which I appreciate from the game. There are a variety of interesting looking toys that get mixed up as you go through different levels. The toys being different shapes and sizes gives a semblance of strategy as well. Beach balls are really big so you want to get them out of the way as soon as possible because if the toys stack up too high, it’s game over.

I do have a couple of nitpicks with Tidy Monsters. There isn’t really much in the way of music. In fact the game itself just refers to what it has as ambiance, which just didn’t do much for me. I also think a tutorial would have been a big help here, as I had several rounds where I just lost and didn’t understand why. Apparently there are spiders that pop up every now and then and if they get into the toy box, you lose. That piece of information, as well as how to get rid of spiders would have been pretty nice to get from the game.

You earn coins by playing the game that you can use to buy one of three power ups. These are both good and bad as they’re a good way to help progress farther in the game, but they also take up space on the screen, so holding onto them for when they’re most needed is sort of a risk as they can contribute to a game over.

For a free arcade game, Tidy Monsters isn’t too bad. It’s not overly invasive with ads, in-app purchases aren’t thrown at you. The only wall comes from an energy meter limiting the amount of games you can play in a set amount of time, which isn’t that bad as I don’t see many people trying to play several rounds of this at once, but it’s a perfectly fine pick up and play for a few minutes title.

The last thing I like is that every round ends with a piece of toy trivia, and so I will leave you all with this: “Archaeologists in Austria have found stone age marbles.”