Monster Train (2020)

I have been beyond fatigued of roguelikes for a long time, but this one has all the right ingredients to make the genre work for me.

This is first and foremost a deck-builder with turn-based card-playing combat, and I think it is a really approachable and fun one. Within a run there are a lot of decisions to make, but never in a way that's overwhelming. The game gave you a lot of information to plan ahead basically the entire run. The rules of combat are extremely clear at any given time and you always get a lot of information to make your choices. My first successes came pretty quickly which was great to help learn the game and give me confidence to increase the challenge level and try new things.

It's the first time I felt one of these games was fun enough to actually keep playing more than a couple hours after "beating" it for the first time, and I expect to keep playing long after this review. The relatively short time for a run and the big variety of deck / perk combinations available that play very differently are big contributors to this. The game does a fantastic job at making you want to try one more time to see what powerful combo of things you can put together.

Deck-building and related aspects aside, the actual combat is the most fun thing here. As sort of a hybrid of card games and tower defense, it has really dynamic fights where you're managing multiple sets of units at once. The tools that the game gives you to fight back can be really exciting, and over the course of several runs you can find yourself needing to cultivate very different conditions to win.

I'm not a huge fan of the game's overall visual style, but it definitely gets the job done in terms of clear visual communication. The different decks you can start with feel appropriately different in their theme and look, and some of the moves you can pull off look appropriately flashy. Presentation-wise they've also done well to make a ton of info accessible quickly, and allow fights to be sped up as needed.

This is for sure one of the best games on Game Pass, and I would recommend it even to people who are not thrilled about playing another roguelike. Even as someone who bounced off the similar Slay the Spire quickly, I thought this was much more fun and engaging. It has what I feel are the fun parts of roguelikes without being quite as punishing, but still with the depth and challenge being there once you're ready for them. Big surprise for me that I liked it this much.

Intro

In MT there are three floors with the "pyre" room above it. Enemies start at the bottom and try to make their way to the room to attack the "pyre". You place units and cast spells to stop them. These are drawn from a deck that starts with basic cards then gets expanded or reduced in size by picking various options.

The Good

I was discussing this game and STS on Reddit and suddenly it hit me. STS is a roguelike version of Northmark: Hour Of The Wolf and MT is a roguelike version of The Trouble With Robots.

Like TTWR it's a deckbuilding game in which you summon units and cast spells drawn randomly. This means it combines deckbuilding and tower defense - two of my favourite genres. The combination works so well because normally one of the weaker parts of the TD genre is the predictability of the towers, while deckbuilding tends to suffer from allies only being cards. MT gives you the variation of a card game and the engagement of building characters in a role-playing game.

Another strength of Monster Train, especially compared to Slay the Spire (which i thought was mediocre) is the amount of starting options. There are 6 factions (1 DLC) each with 2 paths each with a hero. You pick a faction and one of its heroes plus one of two path of a support faction. This gives you a ton of options to try out how things combine. And after that there are 26 difficulty levels (Covenant level 0-25) plus modifiers for non-official games (both boni and mali).

Some other points:

• Games take only 25-50 minutes.
• Optional bonus boss.
• Tons of customisation options for both spells and units.
• Cute theme in which the "heavenly" guys are the baddies.
• All kinds of location events add more variety.
• The game encourages taking weaker cards by giving special borders/stamps for completing a game with them.
• Simple to learn, but with quickly ramping difficulty if you want it.
• The mechanics are quite clever overall - this isn't Hearthstone.

The Bad

• Even at Covenant 1 the endboss has twice as much life, which i think is a bit much.
• At higher Covenant levels you lose more easily to random bullshit like not getting the right upgrade.
• The Endboss is a bit much at Covenant 25. You can breeze through the rest of the game and still lose.
• Melting Remnant/Little Fade seems so much stronger than the other factions/heroes.
• Some units/spells seem much stronger than others (i lost only once when i had a Bounty Stalker).
• No second chances (though you can Alt+F4 before you lose and try again).
• It's beyond annoying that you can't pick starting cards - sometimes you have to reroll a dozen times to get good ones.
• Epic cards (purple dots) are overly rare. In 220 hours i've seen some units only 2-3 times.

Conclusion

Monster Train combines two genres i love with roguelikes, which i hate. Somehow it still manages to be one of my all-time favourite games. It offers nice, quick card/TD games with a lot of variety and progress to be made. After 60 hours i actually reset my progress to start from scratch, just because it was so much fun. I never do that.

I mean, in this game you can kill the endboss with a buffed oven while both have googly eyes, what more do you want?

Pretty much every major review I saw of this game on Steam said "If you like Slay the Spire, try this." So I did. And the two are comparable in many ways. Both are roguelike card builders where you go through waves of enemies with events in-between to upgrade cards, get new artifacts, and otherwise make yourself tougher. Not to mention the fan-made community challenges. But the differences are where Monster Train really shines.

First off, you don't control just one character. You have a "main monster" and summon hordes of minions to fight waves of enemies that spawn each round of combat. And the stage is broken up into three areas, with enemies advancing and trying to smash their way through to your Health Points at the end of each turn. This almost makes it like playing 3 games of Slay the Spire simultaneously and adds another layer to the strategy.

Then there's the customizability. After you've beaten the base game, you can turn on a challenge modifier. These can add buffs, debuffs, random cards, and a slew of other effects to make the game more challenging. Because the base game is actually fairly easy; once you get the hang of it, you'll rarely lose. But this customizable difficultly level, which scales from 1 to 25, means you can keep the game casual and watch Netflix while you play it or go super-hardcore if you like a challenge.

I am more of a casual gamer myself so this is where Monster Train really appeals to me over Slay the Spire. As much as I love Slay the Spire, you need knowledge of meta decks and a decent amount of luck to have a shot of beating the Tower Heart. In Monster Train, damn near any strategy can be viable at the lower levels of play. Some are certainly better than others, but RNG has a much harder time creeping up behind you with a garotte.

So, bottom line, great game. More versatile than Slay the Spire with a lower (and adjustable) difficulty ceiling for all kinds of players. And they do free updates, just like Slay the Spire. Plus Daily Challenges, a "Rush" mode where you race other players towards victory and more so you won't get bored after just unlocking all the cards. I see myself clocking as many hours on here as I did on Slay the Spire in the long run.

This year has been a pretty disappointing experience in terms of games in my opinion; I've only really played two or three of them. But this game in particular has peaked my interest.

I really like this game. It's like Slay the Spire, except you summon monsters (a bit like MTG or Hearthstone) and with some slight tower defence elements. It works really well; you can tell that this has been really well balanced, play tested and refined.

The game is simple to learn and difficult to master. Very satisfying and addictive to play. Animations, music, sound design and progression are on point. You can choose from five different decks/clans to play with, using various combinations to build your deck. There are assorted difficulty levels and each run feels very unique with the assorted bosses, enemies and modifiers. Definitely many hours of content right here, worth checking out.