Monster Train

Monster Train is a deck-building game. It's following in the footsteps of other great games like Slay the Spire. As a result, I will be comparing this game to Slay the Spire a lot. If you are unfamiliar with it, see my (Slay the Spire review).

In Monster Train, you defend a train full of (you guessed it) monsters. You fight a series of battles, with each battle involving a bunch of minor enemies followed by a major (boss) enemy. In-between battles you do some deck construction using various stations. One run takes about 60 to 90 minutes.

I've gotten 85 hours of fun out of this game (plus another 135 with the DLC!).

THE GOOD:

• Monster Train is a really fun card battler.
• The train level mechanic, where you have 4 different levels in your train, adds a lot of strategic depth and novelty.
• The DLC (The Last Divinity) makes this already good game 3 times better. It adds a really strong playable faction, a bunch of new cards and events, new synergies to experiment with, and a whole new boss to challenge you.
• You can always refuse a new card or artifact, something I always wished I could do in Slay the Spire—which would force me to take cards I didn't want and then make it really hard to get rid of them.
• It's also easier to remove cards you don't want, often allowing you to craft the deck you want by the endgame.
• The game lets you know who the major bosses are at the very start of the run. This allows you to build your deck accordingly.
• Great variety of enemies, cards, and special abilities.
• Great learning curve, as new concepts are gradually introduced so you don't have to drink from a firehose of knowledge.
• Nice graphics and music.

THE BAD:

• There is no real story to the game. There's kind of the veneer of a story, but it doesn't really explain why you need to do multiple runs (this is somewhat ameliorated by the DLC).
• Even with the better control over your deck than other games in the genre, you are still at the mercy of the random number generator. It can be frustrating to lose because you never found the cards you needed, or because of a terrible draw for an otherwise great deck.
• The game developers claim this game is a roguelike, but it's not really. You play to unlock new features, which is a good tutorial mechanic, but to be a roguelike the game should require you to learn by failing. I won on my second attempt.

THE UGLY:

• In this game the protagonists are the demons of Hell, and you actually fight against Heavenly angels. This doesn't bother me, but you might find it offensive.
• When using a mouse and dragging a card to play it, if you linger the game can automatically scroll up to a level above. This is a great way to ruin your battle by playing the card on the wrong level!
• The game enables you to ramp up the difficulty with a feature called the Covenant. This is ostensibly a good thing that gives the game some extra life and challenge. Unfortunately, in trying to find a variety of ways to increase the difficulty the game designer has mainly made the game more annoying. They add lots of junk cards to your deck and make it harder to remove those cards. Hence, rather than ending with a bang, the game kind of fizzled out with a whimper as I got increasingly frustrated and quit (the DLC rekindled my interest).