Monster Train (2020)

I have to say, Monster Train's map system is a huge improvement over Slay the Spire's for me.

Playing Slay the Spire, starting a new act and staring at the sea of icons and picking a path (which isn't really a very interesting choice as much as it is processing all the data and optimizing the number of campfire/elite with at least 1 shop) can be sort of mentally exhausting and not very fun, whereas Monster Train just forces you to confront extremely meaningful choices, but always makes you feel good about your choice because you're pathing directly into the things that are best for you.

I almost love this game, but I've come to hate it a bit. The art is good for the genre and the music is great. The game balance is mostly very good, though I have some issues with the balance for individual champions and a couple of enemies. The Hellhorned in particular feel a bit weak and overly reliant on synergies that may or may not show up. I like the themes for all of the factions (a group of candle thugs was a great idea) and the gameplay for 4/5, which I'd say is pretty darn good. Some of the synergies and combos you can run across in a run feel awesome to pull off. You can pull off strategies that have your spells dealing 20x damage, units attacking 10+ times in a turn, or retaliation damage so high the final boss just defeats himself.

All of that said, I'm not a fan of the "flood the deck with shit cards" method of balancing increased difficulty, so the game has become much less fun for me now that I'm close to maxing the difficulty out. Some of the random bosses (particularly bosses with sweep and/or lifesteal) are hard counters to entire strategies, with no way of knowing you'll face them in advance. The final boss has a few forms, each of which soft counter particular strategies, but you know what to expect from the beginning of the run, so this is quite a bit less frustrating. The biggest issue I have is that a runs are generally 1 to 1.5 hours. I'd have much more fun if those numbers were cut in half, as it would make late game losses less frustrating and I'm frankly usually ready to move on to something else by the 45 minute mark. For me, it's just not a sit-down-and-play-for-hours type of game. The frustration is also compounded by the high variance you get in later difficulties with larger deck sizes, random floors having lower capacity and so on. Sometimes it just feels like there was no way to make your deck reliable enough to win, though I'm sure many of those cases are just needing to know the metagame aspects better.

Still, I got about 40-50 hours out of it before wanting to be done with it for good. I'd say it's a 4/5 if you don't tend to get frustrated with video games, and a 3/5 for people like me haha.