A very innovative take on the deck building genre, upping the ante that games like Slay the Spire archieved by effectively making you defend 3 fronts as your train rides straight to hell. The lore and visuals arent really my thing, whats good about it is how varied the 5 races of the game play, and of course, how crazy the synergies can be. The game progresses from fairly easy to beat, to very hard as you level up your convenent with sucessful runs.
One criticism though is that i think its easy difficulty and smaller card rooster makes it less replayable than Slay the Spire, though i on a moment to moment basis i prefer the gameplay systems on offer here. Anyway, its a must play for fans of card games and roguelites.
Edit: a year later and i manage to beat it to max convenant rank, never really varying too much my main strategy. The longer playing time really redefined how much i enjoyed this, even if the amount of possible viable builds is smaller than in Slay the Spire.
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When I played Slay the Spire I enjoyed it, but I just knew that its concept could be applied to something else and there was an amazing game potential there. Well it didn't take that long and Monster Train is one of those games. I really love this game and that was from the 1st run, hope to now where I've unlocked the 5th clan. The game provides so much replay value and increasing challenge, it's pretty addicting and it's just something I can play non-stop while never getting tired of it.
So the basic concept of the game is that you must defend the Pyre on your train, which you do with cards that are either monsters or spells. Your train consists of 3 floors and with the pyre above that. Each turn a wave of enemies appears on the 1st floor, and if they survive they will more to the 2nd floor and so on. If the reach the top they will damage your pyre but it defends itself pretty well too, so it can endure quite a few hits before being destroyed. After several waves of enemies the boss will appear and will attack until either its dead or it has killed all of your monsters on that floor, so the general strategy is to fill your floors with the most monsters and with the strongest buffs. Once that it's done, you will move the next map where you get to choose 2 paths that have various shops, recruits, artifacts and other little benefits. It's always important to choose the best of the 2 paths for your deck type. Map 3, 6 have stronger bosses, while map 8 is the final one that finishes the run.
The game features 5 clans to choose from, and you also have to pick a secondary clan. Your starting cards will be from those 2 clans, and you also get your Champion from your primary clan which is a strong monster than costs 0 and always starts in your opening hand. The cards you find on the way will be off those 2 clans, think a little bit like of the 5 colors in Magic: The Gathering which each clan having its own respective style. In total that makes 20 different combinations of clans to make, and the game will track your progress with each of those. As you progress with the clans you'll get more card and artifact unlocks and eventually a 2nd champion choice at level 5. Once you've completed your first run the game introduces Covenant levels, which adds extra challenges to runs and that goes up to 25 and it does get very hard as you rise up in those.
The strategies in the game are great, and you will need to play a few runs to get used to each clan. Even when picking the same clan combination, there's so many ways to build your deck and depending on which artifact you score you will need to adapt to the most optimal strategy. There's a lot of decision making not only in the deckbuilding aspect, but also how you lay out your monsters in the train and how you use your cards every turn. Errors can be very punishing but it's just something that you get better as you continue to play the game.
Very impressive game overall and at this point my favorite roguelike deckbuilder, it builds on established concepts and just makes it better. I feel that it's a complete experience, the runs are just the right amount of time (about 30-50 minutes each) and doesn't feel like they drag on forever. It's tons of fun, replay value is very high and pretty much scratches the itch that I have for card games. One of the best games of 2020 that should be bigger, it deserves all the praise it has and I do hope the devs continue the support for it for years to come.
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