Monster Maker

Review by eFreeware

Keeping young children busy with something that rewards imagination rather than reflexes is harder than it sounds. Drawing apps can be too open-ended for a five-year-old, and most games hand the creativity to the designer. A character builder sits in a useful middle ground: the pieces are supplied, but the decisions belong to the child. Monster Maker, from the developer Sunny Kid Games, is one of the better-known examples of that idea, and it has been in the Parenting category long enough to gather a sizeable audience.

The premise is straightforward. You pick a background, choose a body or supply a photo of your own, then add eyes, a mouth and accessories until the creature looks the way you want. Everything can be moved, resized or thrown away, and the finished monster can be kept in an album or sent to friends and family. It is free to install and supported by advertising, and there are no in-app purchases to worry about.

What interests me about it as a reviewer is the audience it is built for. This is not a tool for a skilled digital artist, and it does not pretend to be. It is a shared activity for parents and children, and the design choices follow from that. The install numbers and the 4.5 average from 2,915 ratings suggest the approach has landed with families, though the rating count is modest next to the install base.

Building a creature one piece at a time

The core of the app is assembly. You choose a background first, then a body, and from there you layer on the parts that give the character its personality. Bodies, eyes, noses and mouths are all separate choices, and the developer says the combinations run into the thousands. Working through those options is the whole activity, and it is the part that will hold a child's attention longest.

Accessories are where the humor comes from. Hats, mustaches, glasses, horns, wigs and bows can be stacked on top of the basic face, and the developer notes that these allow for a wide range of expressions, from happy to angry to surprised. The result is the sort of deliberately ridiculous face that children find funny for reasons adults stop understanding around age nine.

The manipulation is kept simple on purpose. Each object can be enlarged or shrunk by tapping it repeatedly, which is a gentler learning curve than pinch gestures for small hands. To remove something, you drag it to a garbage basket, and pressing the basket itself clears everything at once. That last option is worth knowing about, since it is the fastest route back to a blank canvas when a creation has gone wrong.

Turning a selfie into a monster

The feature that separates this from a plain sticker book is the camera. Instead of choosing a prepared body, you can take a picture of a landscape, an object, a friend, a pet or yourself, and use that as the base for the character. Eyes, mouths and accessories then go on top of the photo.

I can see why the developer leads with this. A child making a monster out of a family photo, or out of the dog, is a different kind of joke from one assembled from clip art, and it gives the app a reason to be brought out at a gathering rather than played alone. Friends and pets can appear in the photo too, so it does not have to be a self-portrait.

The obvious caveat is that this part depends on the device's camera. That does mean the camera-based side of things is a shared activity rather than something a child does unsupervised.

Saving the good ones and sending them on

Finished monsters go into an album, from which they can be viewed again or shared whenever you like. That album is what turns a single sitting into something with a bit of continuity: a child can build a collection over time rather than starting from nothing each visit.

Sharing is handled through the usual channels. The developer lists WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, email and other popular networks, so a creation can be sent to grandparents or posted for relatives to see. Nothing about this is unusual, and that is fine; the point is that the app hands off to whatever messaging or social app is already on the device.

The developer also asks users to leave a rating on Google Play, framing it as a way to support further free apps. That is a common request and it is stated plainly.

What it asks of you, and what it does not do

The requirements here are modest. The app is free and rated for Everyone. Advertising is present, which is the trade-off for that price, and it is the main thing a parent should expect going in. I would not expect a quiet, uninterrupted experience from what the app offers.

The other consideration is scope. This is a character builder and nothing more. It does not teach drawing technique. It is built as a way for children and parents to spend time together being creative.

Anyone hoping for a tool that grows with an older child will find the ceiling arrives quickly. The parts are fixed, the manipulation is deliberately basic, and the appeal rests on how funny the combinations are rather than on depth. For the age group it is aimed at, that is not a flaw so much as the design brief.

Where this fits in a family's app collection

The clearest fit is a household with children roughly of preschool to early primary age, where a parent is happy to sit alongside them for a while. The combination of a camera, a big pile of silly parts and a share button makes it a natural choice for a rainy afternoon, a long wait somewhere, or a family gathering where cousins need something to do together.

It also works as a low-stakes introduction to creative apps. A child who has never made anything on a screen can start by picking a background and a body, then add a hat, and have something recognizable within a couple of minutes. The tap-to-resize and drag-to-bin controls are forgiving of clumsy fingers, which matters more than it sounds at that age.

For teenagers or adults looking for a serious character design tool, the app will feel thin. It is a toy in the best sense, and it is honest about that.

A free, ad-supported pick for younger children

Monster Maker does one thing and does it at a price that is hard to argue with. It gives children a set of parts, a camera and a background, and lets them make something ridiculous out of it in a few minutes. It is a family activity built around creativity.

The case for installing it rests on the age of your child and your tolerance for advertising. If you have a four- to eight-year-old who enjoys making faces and sending them to relatives, this is a reasonable addition to the tablet. If you are looking for something with more depth, the app is not trying to be that.

I would treat it as a shared activity rather than a solo one, particularly when the camera is involved. On that basis, and with a 4.5 average from a few thousand ratings behind it, it is a sensible free pick for families who want a creative distraction rather than a curriculum.

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