Monsters Love Candy is a matching puzzle game that has great potential but unfortunately falls flat with an uninspired main story line, unbalanced in-game currency system, and achievements which require excessive grinding.
First, you’ll progress through the main story, unlocking all of the areas of the game. Next, you’ll work on the multiplayer achievements. Lastly, you’ll grind out the miscellaneous achievements.
MISSABLE ACHIEVEMENTS: While no achievements are truly missable, two achievements (Sweet Tooth and The Candy Touch) require jewels. There are a limited number of jewels that you can earn in the game for free. If you spend all of those jewels before unlocking these achievements, you will have to spend real money to get more jewels.
The heart of the game is a board-clearing puzzle game. Unlike some other games, you can match in any direction, including diagonals. Additionally, the board doesn't collapse immediately after you make a chain; you can make multiple chains which combine to form a bonus for clearing the entire board. You have 60 seconds to clear as many symbols from a board as possible.
While you get more points the longer the chain is, the real source of your score is how much of the board you can clear before it drops. Especially getting the board completely cleared is worth a considerable bonus. This also increases your multiplier bar. Note that once your multiplier bar hits the next multiplier, getting more matches before the board collapses doesn't help. You will often be just short of the 2x multiplier after your first set of matches. It is usually worth just getting one or two chains to help you reach 2x and let the board collapse so that you can start earning double points (and making progress towards the 3x multiplier).
The first tip is that this game is likely to be uncompletable without a touch screen. While you can do well with a mouse, some of the harder levels require speed that would be exceptionally hard using a mouse. Using a trackpad is right out.
At the start of the game, you’re playing with no assistance, but you’ll be able to capture monsters that have various boosts. The boosts in the Forest (the first world) aren’t that interesting, but when you reach the Desert, you should pick up monsters with Magic Magnet and when you reach the Cave (the third world), you want to find monsters with Stray Angel. In particular, Jumper (a common with 2 Stray Angel boosts) and Meemo (a rare with 3 Stray Angel boosts) are the best monsters in the entire game.
Stray Angel makes it particularly easy to clear an entire board. Your general strategy if you’ve got 2 Stray Angel boosts is to use one early to clear all of the isolated candy, and then trace the linked candy to eliminate them. There might be some linked chains that you can’t clear completely and that’s where using a second stray at the very end to clean those up can help.
There are two in-game currencies: coins and jewels. Coins are easy enough to come by, but jewels are rare. You only get jewels when you gain a level and there are only 30 levels to gain for just over 500 jewels. If you need more, you have to pay real money to get them. In addition to the things you need to spend jewels on, you can use them to play with legendary or mythical monsters, skip ads, and extend the time on a level. None of these are worth the real cash cost to replace the lost jewels. You need about 220 jewels to complete the achievements.
One non-achievement item that is worth buying is the double-coins upgrade which costs 100 jewels. This basically makes coins a non-issue. With Meemo and the double-coin upgrade, you can easily pay for her cost and then some with every round, essentially giving you an unlimited supply to coins. Given how many games you’re going to have to play, this is clearly worth it.
When you start up the game, you’re introduced to the tutorial where you are capturing a monsters in the Forest world. The game will show you the basics of how to play. I don’t know if it’s possible to fail this level as both the capture threshold and the 3 star threshold are quite low. When you capture the monster, you will unlock:
Pure SugarYou fed the first Monster you found in the Forest.

Now play through each of the levels in the Forest world. Don’t worry about getting 3 stars on all of them yet; just get enough stars to unlock the next area and to unlock the Desert.
Do keep an eye out for common and rare monsters that have the different boosts. You can find the Bubble Up, Score Master, Star Blossom, and Sugar Bomb boosts. Be sure to capture monsters that have each of these boosts; use those monsters to play a round, and activate each of the boosts.
Now start on the Desert world to unlock:
In the Desert, there are monsters with Color Clear, Magnet Magic, Super Swipe, and Time Freeze boosts. Capture common or rare monsters and use each boost at least once. You probably want to capture a Magnet Magic monster to use for most of your rounds.
Start on the Cave world. No achievement here, but there are monsters with the Stray Angel boost. In particular, capture Jumper and/or Meemo. If you haven’t bought the double-coins upgrade, Meemo will be too expensive to use continuously as you’ll run out of coins. Keep playing the early levels (where common and rare monsters are more frequent) until you’ve captured them.
At this point, go back and get every star in the Forest world (if you haven’t already) to unlock:
Also make sure you have three stars in every level of the Desert and the Cave. Should be pretty easy if you're using Meemo.
The Tundra world increases the difficulty by adding a new symbol so there are now five possible candies to use in matching instead of just four. This actually makes the Stray Angel boost more powerful as there are likely to be more unmatched symbols. However, it is harder to make matches when not using the boost and harder to activate the boost (fewer chains of the required colors). Play the first level to unlock:
Get 3 stars in every level here and go to the Coastline. The coastline features monsters with the Color Link boost. Capture one of these monsters and use that boost to unlock:
Reach the last world in the Coastline to unlock:
Then get 3 stars on every level in the Coastline to unlock:
You’ll also probably hit 100 games about now:
Now let’s do some multiplayer. I do this before the grinding because these games can help you make progress.
First are the friend achievements. While these are multiplayer, they don’t actually involve playing with anyone. The crown for a level is awarded to the person on your friend list that has the highest score in that level. Find which of the five worlds you have the most crowns in and then see which of your friends have the other crowns. Unfriend them. Repeat until you have all of the crowns in that world to unlock:
(If you’re really good, or have really bad friends, you might have unlocked this naturally.)
Now, go refriend those people. Depending on the size of your friend list, you may need to recruit some additional people who have played the game. You can either do this by asking on forums (like here) soliciting friend requests, or making additional dummy Microsoft Accounts, friending them, and having those accounts play the game (since the game is free).
When you have 10 friends who have played Monsters Love Candy, you’ll unlock:
Now for real multplayer. Start a new multiplayer game with a random match. Try to do your best. Multiplayer is asynchronous; when you start a new game, the server looks for a submitted score for the first half of a game and has you play the second half. If it can’t find one, then you get to play the first half of the game and later, you’ll find out whether you won or not when your half is paired against someone else’s half.
You have to win 50 random matches. There are three ways of doing this:
- You can play random matches and win. My experience is that many people don’t use any boost monsters much, so you can use Meemo and throw down a powerful score.
- You can collude; try sending your opponent a message over Xbox LIVE asking for help. After the random match is over, you can choose rematch and the rematch counts as a new “random” match. With help, you and your opponent can trade wins back and forth and quickly unlock this.
- If there aren’t many multiplayer players around at the time you play, you can try to get matched against yourself. This requires two MS accounts that are trying to play random multiplayer games. As soon as your two accounts get paired against each other, you can use the rematch trick described in #2 to quickly run through all of the wins.
Note that the game seems to keep count based on the history in your multiplayer record. If you remove games from your history, then your count of wins goes down, so don’t delete any previously played games (or at least wins) until the achievement unlocks.
Getting to 50 wins will unlock both:
Sugar On TopYour matching skills have you on top of the pile.

Next are the miscellaneous achievements:
When you’re playing the game, be sure to come back to the game for 10 days in a row. You get bonus coins for every consecutive day you return. Be sure to quit the game when you’re done playing every day and play at about the same time every day. On the 10th day, you will unlock:
Next go to the store and buy the Marvelous Minty Mix (the only customization item that costs coins instead of jewels) to unlock:
Then go to the store and buy the Level 1 upgrade for all 10 boosts to unlock:
This requires 190 jewels, plus 120,000 coins. Coins shouldn’t be a problem if you have the double-coin upgrade. You might not have enough jewels to do that yet, but buy the Stray Angel upgrade first and buy the others as you gain levels.
Your next goal is to find a mythical monster. As you can see, they are incredibly rare. They only appear in the final five worlds of a level, and have only a 2% to 10% chance of appearing. Keep replaying those levels until you find them. Note that once you’ve played a level, there is quite a long timeout before you can play it again unless you watch an ad.
It might be tempting to cancel out of a match when you don’t get the mythical, but don’t do that. You need every match for your final achievement.
When you finally find that mythical monster, you unlock:
At the same time, we are also searching for legendary monsters. You have to use 10 legendary monsters as your boost monster and legendary monsters always require jewels to use. While they have more boosts than uncommon monsters, that doesn’t begin to make up for the cost of jewels to use them, so this is the only time you’ll be using legendary boost monsters.
As you play levels, keep track of which legendary monsters you find. When you find one that you haven’t seen before, capture it and use it once. When you do this with 10 different legendary monsters, you’ll unlock:
But wait, you’re not done. Now you’re trying to find every monster in a world; that means getting the other four mythical monsters in that same world, as well as all of the common, rare, and legendary monsters.
Almost certainly while grinding through levels to find the last mythical monsters, you’ll unlock:
Then when you find all of the monsters, you’ll unlock:
Only one achievement left, but it will take you longer than all of those combined. You have to reach research level 30.
Except for level 1, the amount of XP you need to gain a level is equal to 100 times your current level (if you’re level 15, you need 1500xp to reach level 16.). Most likely, you’re probably around level 12 when you have the rest of the achievements (except maybe some that require jewel purchases). That means about 35000xp more is needed to reach level 30.
Each match earns XP. A multiplayer match is always 25xp. A single-player match is the total of these components:
- Your star score: 0 stars = 5xp, 1 star = 9xp, 2 stars = 12xp, 3 stars = 20xp
- Your boost monster: Common = 3xp, Rare = 7xp, Legendary = 15xp, Mythical = 20xp
- The captured monster: Common = 1xp, Rare = 3xp, Legendary = 6xp, Mythical = 10xp
- You get a 5xp bonus for evolving a monster for the first time.
There are three approaches to doing this:
- Play the last level of a world. You’ll earn about 33xp per match and each match will take about 2 minutes (1 minute for the game, 30 seconds for the ad, and 30 seconds of other loading time) or about 990xp/hour.
- Play the first level five levels of a world. You’ll earn about 28xp per match and each match will take about 1.5 minutes (1 minute for the game and 30 seconds of loading time) or about 1120xp/hour. More matches; fewer ads.
- Play multiplayer matches. You earn 25xp no matter what you do (no need to earn 3 stars). This lets you play matches while actually doing something else. However, starting a multiplayer match can be time consuming at points. I’ll estimate each match taking 2 minutes here which is 750xp/hour.
Regardless of your methods, you’re looking at 30 to 40 hours just for this one achievement before you reach level 30 and unlock:
Sugar RushYour promotions got you to level 30, incredible!

After finally getting this, it is likely that you will uninstall this game and never touch it again. At least you have a full completion.