Monster Train by Shiny Shoe is a deck building roguelike that was released earlier in 2020. 2020 seems to be a year of deck building games for me, I guess there is something comforting about slowly unlocking and growing your characters and decks in a year when everything seems to have ground to a halt!
So, I am starting to fancy myself to have some track experience with respect to these types of games now... A dilettante rather than a competitive Magic the Gathering player!
The Setup
Okay, these games don't really have a huge story arc... after all, how much of a real story line can you fuse to a game genre where you die over and over again, starting afresh with a slightly stronger team or character. Groundhog Day has already been done as a movie...
So, Monster Train has you play as the last remnants of the forces of Hell. Hell has frozen over after being defeated by the Angelic hordes and you are are in charge of bringing the last shard of Hellfire back to the depths of Hell, to reignite the fires of Hell and breathe life back into the underworld.
... on a train.
The Game
There is a nice twist on the initial deck setup in this game. Instead of just choosing a single deck and running with it, you select a primary Clan and a secondary Clan. Your hero unit will come from the primary Clan, but the card deck will be constructed from a mix of two.
There are a total of 6 Clans to unlock, leading to a healthy combination of card decks that you can start the game with. In addition, as you complete or fail runs with the Clans, you will level them up and unlock additional cards and monsters to field.
The gameplay is a sort of tower defence sort across the three levels of the train, with each round having monsters attack and you playing cards from your hand to try and repel the angelic boarders. Enemies enter in from the lowest level and at the end of each turn they ascend a level until they begin to attack your Hellfire directly. When the Hellfire is killed, the run is over.
Mixing things up are the bosses who enter the train at the last wave. You have a single hand to play on each train level and the monsters and boss will duke it out until the defences or the Angel are overcome. As the boss kills off each level, the train level is frozen over but will be defrosted for the next stage.
These bosses are real tough guys... so, you will need to have built some defence in depth in the previous angel minion waves.
Defeating the waves will reward you with gold, cards and possibly artefacts ... a familiar drill from most deck-builders. This will give you the resources to enhance your existing cards and spells whilst expanding the repertoire of monsters that you can deploy to defend your train.
Each card pack reward allows you to choose one from three choices. Generally it is a pretty tough choice, but you will want to maximise the synergies between your existing decks and the vastly different style foci of each of the Clans.
Each overland stage consists of the entrance battle, after which you are presented with a branching choice. Each of the two branches has several stops which will offer a variety of possible upgrades, from shops to enhance cards (for gold...), monster recruitment or just healing/gold. So, choose carefully, as you can only take a single path!
There are only 7 stages (the layers of Hell?), which I do find to be a bit on the short side of things.
Unlike some of the other games in this genre, the text-based choices aren't really that involving. You are given a short story filler and a simple choice with defined and known outcomes. There is no chance involved and there is the possibility to opt out of the choice altogether. Other games that I have played have made this a tougher choice, with the opt out option being BEFORE you know what the consequences of the choices are.
Visuals, Sound and Performance
The visuals of the game are pretty slick and not too demanding. However, I've not tried to play it on anything without a dedicated GPU. However, I suspect that this game won't need too much graphical grunt to keep it running.
The art style of the cards does remind one of Hearthstone... and I'm not the only one who has noted that! Meanwhile, the rest of the game has a bright and bold style that makes the forces of Hell look quite adorable!
Sound and Music are decent... nothing particularly memorable, but not jarring. There are specific compositions for the big bosses, which makes for a nice touch.
My Thoughts
I really do enjoy the tower defence twist on the deck-building rogue genre that Monster Train brings to the table. The art style and the easy to follow synergies of the cards makes for a particularly pleasing gaming experience.
However, I fear that with such short runs, Monster Train will be condemned to the more casual gaming times. It is a great feeling to reach the end and reignite the Hellfires... but the number of stages feels too short as you are only starting to grow and develop your deck before it is all suddenly finished!
Still, it has been one of the more enjoyable of the deck-builders that I have played this year.... and I have played quite a few of them!
Review Specs
Played at 1080p (144Hz) on:
XMG Fusion 15
CPU: i7-7700HQ
RAM: 16 GB
Storage: SSD
GPU: Nvidia GTX 1050
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