Monster Train 2 Review: A COMPLEX Roguelike Deckbuilder!

The original Monster Train came into my life at a time when I had just emerged from the murky depths of my hopeless addiction to Slay the Spire.  It, having been my first deckbuilder ever and proof that my imaginary disinterest in the genre was nothing but a mirage, I was chomping at the bit to try something even remotely similar.  And as if my hype senses weren’t tingling enough, Monster Train was the first roguelike deckbuilder I’d personally heard called better than Slay the Spire by a surprising number of enthusiastic deckbuilding fans.

But anybody who’s ever heard me wax poetic about Slay the Spire in one form or another knows that it remains not only my single favorite deckbuilder, but one of my favorite indie games of all time.  And when it comes to titles that even skirt the boundary of its excellence, never mind breach it, Monster Train isn’t usually on my list.  And that’s because I’m of the mind that Monster Train is a really good game, but one that’s only especially phenomenal if you’re a very specific type of deckbuilder fan.  And somehow, Monster Train 2 is both better than the original in a lot of ways and yet doubles down on exactly the aspects about it that occasionally rubbed me the wrong way.  But I’ll get into that.

For those unfamiliar with the original Monster Train, here’s a basic rundown of what to expect: Monster Train puts a bunch of monsters on a… stay with me now… train… that winds its way up a branching track all the way to Heaven, I guess?  Sorry, Monster Train 2 tries to have a visual novel-esque plot with narrative interludes between runs, and it did not even slightly hold my attention, so that’s all I’m going to say about it.  On the gameplay front, which is what’s important here, Monster Train deviates from traditional roguelike deckbuilders by stuffing their core mechanics into a tower defense shell. 

Rather than have a single character or party of characters fight against an increasingly devious pool of randomly generated enemies, Monster Train shuffles your fighters into your deck and asks you to place them throughout three different floors of your train.  On the fourth floor at the top of the train sits your Pyre, which you must protect at any and all costs.  

Each battle in Monster Train 2 starts with a deployment phase, which is a welcome change in this sequel, allowing you to place your units throughout each level of the train before any enemies start shuffling in.  Each floor will have a certain capacity and each character a certain capacity cost, allowing you to usually squeeze two or three characters on the same level before maxing out.  You can upgrade the maximum capacity as the run proceeds, but note that having each floor covered is going to be very important to success.

Once the deployment phase is over, enemies will appear on the first floor and the fighting will begin.  Just as your characters do, each enemy will have buffs or passive traits that you’ll need to consider when trying to dispose of them.  But what’s unique here is that after a single turn, most enemies won’t stick around for more punishment – rather, they’ll move up one floor and it’ll be the responsibility of your second-floor characters to continue fighting them while the first floor deals with a whole new set of enemies.  Hopefully, the tower defense angle is starting to come into focus – if your enemies make it past the third floor without being killed, they’ll move all the way up and begin attacking your Pyre.  Thankfully, your Pyre is hardly defenseless, and in Monster Train 2 can have a wide variety of attributes to choose at the start of your run.  But unlike the characters in your deck, damage done to the Pyre is permanent, and can only be healed at a lucky few stops in between battles.

Speaking of the time between battles, this is your opportunity to do a whole lot of leveling up and boosting of skills, as well as earning gold, healing your Pyre, and recruiting new units to your deck.  But Monster Train 2 is an incredibly complicated game, a theme that is going to emerge more and more as this review goes on, so I can’t quite explain the activities between battles without rewinding a fair bit to the very beginning.

Each time you boot up Monster Train 2, you can either do a standard run, a daily challenge, a community challenge, a Dimensional run which mixes up the rules for some interesting variety, and an Endless run which allows you to see how far you can go before dying.  There’s a ton of content here, no doubt, but most of the time you’ll be opting for a standard run since all that other stuff won’t mean much when most of the game’s content is yet to be unlocked.  

While most deckbuilders have you picking a single class to play as for a run, the Monster Train series allows you to mix and match decks by picking a primary clan and an allied clan between the five total clans available.  The primary clan will determine what sort of Champion you get, which is your core starting unit that you’ll immediately begin upgrading and using as a key part of your deck.  Then your choice of allied clan will still allow you to start with a variety of unique cards and skills relevant to them, and see how you can synergize these abilities with those of the other clan for maximum power.

As you travel your way up the Monster Train’s track, the aftermath of each battle will have you selecting between two diverging paths that will usually cater to either your primary or allied clan, depending on whom you want to recruit units, upgrade abilities, and so on.  The choices you make here in how to upgrade your units, spend your gold, and add new cards to your deck will be crucial the further you go, as the difficulty in Monster Train goes up drastically with each battle, expecting that you’ll have leveled up accordingly before taking on a new fight.

If all of this sounds like a lot, then hang in there, because I haven’t even scratched the surface of Monster Train 2’s complexities.  Similar to Slay the Spire and other deckbuilders, you’ll have a few energy points each turn that you can use to play cards.  While placing a unit does count as playing a card and uses energy accordingly, you’ll often have to choose between placing a new unit to do some passive damage to enemies or taking on the enemies more directly.  There are spell cards that’ll let you directly attack an enemy unit.  There are room cards, new to Monster Train 2, that will allow you to apply a buff to an entire room, like making spells in it more powerful.  There are equipment cards, also new to Monster Train 2, that you can attach to one of your units to make them more powerful or synergize with an existing ability they have.  There are also abilities each unit can have that you have to manually scroll through and trigger at no cost other than an occasionally lengthy cooldown.  And of course, this doesn’t even begin to touch upon the dozens upon dozens upon dozens upon dozens (seriously) of different status effects, buffs, debuffs, ability triggers, and so on.

This gets into my core issue with the Monster Train series in general, but especially Monster Train 2, which has for some reason sought to double down on its own ruthless complexity in ways that left me completely exhausted at times.  Nearly every deckbuilder will have some sort of game-specific lingo in a given card that’s spelled out in detail with a blurb right next to it.  Because without that blurb, there’s no way I’m going to understand what a Gellysneeze is, or what Valor means, or Shift, or Resolve, or Pyregel.  But in Monster Train 2, every single unit will have so many pieces of Monster Train-specific lingo often buried within one another like a Russian nesting doll, that not all of it may even fit, and the information will sometimes be unavailable in moments where it would be helpful. 

You’ll have a champion card that might have the multistrike ability, and then a triggerable ability called Savior that will advance it to the front of the floor and make it gain 5 Valor, where Valor adds a unit of damage per stack but also raises your Armor to match the stack count if this unit is the front unit at the end of your turn.  Did that make a lick of sense to you?  Because granted, it’s easier to read than to hear, but this is still the magnitude of information you’ll have to parse out with many of your unit cards, and as a result, gaining a fundamental understanding of how they function and how to synergize them with the rest of your deck becomes an exercise in pure stamina.

This is why I say that the Monster Train series, Monster Train 2 in particular, is for a very specific type of deckbuilder fan – one who views near-endless complexity as an asset rather than a liability.  But in my eyes, every roguelike deckbuilder’s design is a careful tightrope walk – you have to give enough options to allow for creative synergies and run variety, but each level of complexity steepens the need for a clean, readable user interface with easy access to all relevant information, and careful enough balance that it’s undesirable to default to the same strategies every time you see them.  Slay the Spire does this phenomenally, making each decision intuitively predictable in its result while allowing plenty of room for experimentation.  But if Slay the Spire is a carefully-constructed abacus with a limited number of tightly-interwoven elements to manipulate, Monster Train 2 is a McDonald’s ball pit where every ball is a new mechanic or status effect or enemy type that you can slam into all the others and see what happens, balance be damned. 

Try keeping track of all of those balls at once and you may very well drive yourself insane.  Embrace the chaos, however, and you can develop some crazy, overpowered, creative-as-hell synergies that can feel deeply satisfying to pull off.  This remains true even when Monster Train 2’s moment-to-moment gameplay suffers under the weight of its own clutter.

There is undoubtedly a ton of content in Monster Train 2, but its emphasis on what I’d call needless complexity can, in some cases, completely mess up an otherwise stellar run.  For example, in one battle, I played a card that did a certain amount of damage to every enemy on a floor.  Or at least I thought that’s what it did, but it turns out it did damage to everyone, including my own units, one of which was instrumental to winning the battle.  So ended the run.

And listen – I get it.  That’s a case where I misread the card, and it was totally my fault that my run ended.  But the number of variables that need to be juggled at one time in Monster Train 2 made my head spin to a degree that makes mistakes like this inevitable.  You have to keep track of all your units, their triggerable abilities, buffs and debuffs, enemy buffs and debuffs, any buffs applied to any given room, any equipment you’ve attached to your units, any artifacts you’ve picked up that change the rules in one way or another, the number of dragon eggs you’ve collected, what moon phase you’re in, and the list goes on and on.  I’m not saying this kind of complexity can’t serve the game to some degree, but there needs to be a counterbalance for the amount of careful attention it requires.  After playing Starvaders recently, a deckbuilder that balanced its occasionally high complexity with a limited rewind function that could take you back to the start of your turn if you catastrophically mess up, I kept wishing for a similar feature to exist in Monster Train 2.

Undoubtedly though, Monster Train 2 is a fun game.  Its most creative synergies are incredibly empowering, its consistent application of unique risk/reward scenarios adds a ton of interesting decision-making to each run, and the amount of unique, varied content on offer is pretty much unmatched.  But frankly, if the core gameplay is so taxingly busy that playing it tires me out rather than making me wish for one more run, no volume of content can make up for that shortcoming.

Thankfully, if you’re already a huge fan of Monster Train and its complexities don’t bother you, virtually every change in its sequel is for the better.  The Deployment phase is a great addition allowing you to better prepare your train for the massive influx of enemies, the new clans are unique and creatively designed, new card types are interesting and helpful, and the addition of Endless and Dimensional modes adds massive replayability.  Also, while the game’s art style has a lot of similarities to the original, this sequel clearly had a higher budget for its artwork and it shows.  Every unit fills the screen with vibrant colors, smooth animations and a unique art direction that makes the game visually shine.  It also plays fantastically on the Steam Deck, which is certainly my ideal way to play any and all deckbuilders, so happy to report that to be the case here.  Its soundtrack has a lot of solid tunes as well, which feel like an appropriately intense backdrop for everything happening on screen.

Overall, everything about Monster Train 2 feels catered to fans of the original.  If you’ve played the original and loved it, there is nothing about this sequel to be remotely concerned about – this may very well be one of your favorite games of the year.  If you haven’t played the original but are familiar with deckbuilders, I’d start with that one first since it’s frequently on sale and a little bit simpler to pick up without the baggage of the sequel’s extra mechanics, good as many of them are.  And if you’ve never played a deckbuilder before, I honestly have no clue why you’d start here, because Monster Train 2 is not an easy game to get into, even if putting the time in to learn its systems is eventually worth the effort.

GOOD