The roguelike deckbuilder is a remorseless evil that strives to colonise every dream ever dreamt by the human brain. It is a sparkling, shuffling plague, germinated by Slay The Spire, that threatens to absorb every other mortal pastime, from space travel through poker to carpentry. We must find a way to neutralise the entity before it assimilates us all. But in the words of the oldest proverb: just one more go. Just one more go, before I dissipate raging into that goodnight. Just one more run, before I play all those shortform avant garde releases in my Itch.io wallet.
If Monster Train 2 were the last roguelike deckbuilder I ever played, I would consider myself fairly pleased, and also very relieved. While not a huge departure from the game that plunged Matt Cox (RPS in peace) into unholy raptures, it’s a great pick if you’re fond of numbers going up and realising it’s 1.30am and that you are now too addled by card synergies to sleep. You do not have to like or understand trains, but it’s a plus.
As with Monster Train, Monster Train 2 is about riding a demon locomotive through an alternating series of battles and upgrade or customisation opportunities. In the first game, you were trying to oust the angelic hosts from the heart of hell. In this one, the angels and devils have bandied together to chase off the Titans, who’ve taken possession of Heaven.
There’s a certain amount of plot lodged in the crevices of the lobby town. This worried me at first – character development? In my progression system? – but it mostly consists of gentle sitcom sketches in which dragons complain about their husbands. Rest assured that none of it will keep you from your precious synergies. While embarked on your celestial commute, you will also bumble into random storylets that sometimes offer boons plucked from other roguelike deckbuilders, such as Balatro. The roguebuilding decklike singularity is nigh.
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The game’s big draw versus those other turn-based card battlers is that it’s actually three card battles in parallel, each feeding into the next like cunningly enfolded lanes in a tower defence game. During each skirmish, you pop unit cards on the lower three floors of your train to protect the all-important pyre on your fourth floor. The pyre is the source of points you’ll spend to play cards each turn. If it gets smashed to bits, your run is over.
Following a deployment phase, waves of enemies appear at the bottom (mostly) and travel upwards through the train, fighting a single round of combat per floor. This continues until the final assault from the local boss, which dispenses with the single-round-per-floor parameter – the boss must clear each floor of defenders before moving on. While units do battle automatically at the end of each turn, generally targeting the first enemy in the opposing line-up, you can intervene manually using spell cards that, for example, coat critters in Pyrogel to multiply damage received, or dazzle them with stardust so that they miss a turn.
It may seem a rickety, unintuitive format on paper. In practice, it’s wonderful. The overall challenge is to divide your cards and points scientifically between floors. An obvious gambit is to stock the bottom floor with your tankiest, most damaging cards to bollard the onslaught and saddle enemies with debuffs early on – there are plenty of attackers that power-up as they fight or climb. But the one-round-per-floor setup ensures that you can’t rely on any single floor. Besides, if that over-fortified foundation crumbles, the other, under-crewed layers will probably fall as well.
Enemy waves also form deviously alternating combinations of unit types, which thwart efforts to optimise any particular floor. Your heavies in Second Class might excel at melting juggernauts, but they’ll struggle against the hordes of fungus making their way back from the cafeteria.
Monster Train 2 retains all this curious, rattling magic, but fills out the gaps with a bunch of new card categories and interactables, probably derived from careful observation of the first game’s players. There’s now a choice of starting pyres, with varying stats and modifiers. Some unit cards have or may acquire abilities, which essentially give you a free move: these include conjuring back the last spell you cast, and body-slamming targets into the rearguard.
New equipment cards can be clapped on friend and foe alike to, for example, harm assailants based on the wearer’s max health, or chip-damage a unit when they shift between floors. I’ve found that last one especially useful in the case of more agile bosses, who roam around like disgruntled ticket collectors before committing to the push.
Room cards, meanwhile, help you specialise floors. Turn one into a fighting arena and you can farm the small fry for easy pyre points to spend on expensive cards elsewhere. Introduce a planetarium and you’ll amplify any magic you weave within. I have never been brave enough to play the burning room that does 50 points of damage to units inside, but there’s probably a way to hack the card chemistry so that the incendiary conditions actually benefit your defenders.
All of these ins and outs are shaped by the five factions, each a reworking and elaboration of elements from the original game. You pick two as your primary and secondary clan for each run, which dictates your starting champion card – a named unit with a choice of upgrade paths – and the kinds of cards you’ll acquire at rest stops between battles.
The factions are a treat, each a verdant entanglement of playstyles. I will spoil the workings of just two. The strength of the Lunar Coven waxes and wanes with the phases of the moon. As such, victory often comes from delicately timing your most powerful cards, but the hitch is that some cards are more potent when the moon is full, others when it’s in shadow.
The dragons of Pyreborn, meanwhile, are all about gold – grabbing fat stacks early in the run, melting it down into lobbable slag (“Make It Rain”), or jealously hoarding it for buffs. The first time I beat Monster Train 2 it was thanks to the Pyreborn’s Greed Dragons, who accrue health and attack points based on how many dragon eggs you’ve acquired. You can hatch those eggs for artifacts, which may be sensible when you’re trundling up to the last boss, but I consider that a poor return for sacrificing a train’s worth of Smaughs.
Buffs! Buffs? Buffs. As with many a Spirelike, much of Monster Train 2’s enchantment comes from “breaking” the combat, which is to say, violently skewing the starting card capacities in ways doubtless envisaged by the designers using an artful compound of hallucinogens and spreadsheets. A case study: here is how you transform Ekka, High Witch of the Coven with a proud total of five attack and health points, into a titan slayer. First, you’ll want to pick either the Celestial Spellweaver or Silver Empress upgrade paths, each of which steadily accrues magical power, or Conduit. The Spellweaver gains it for every spell you cast on the same floor, while the Empress gets a massive boost while the moon is full.
You’ll probably want to deploy Ekka alongside a Lunar Priestess, who performs a ritual each turn that slops yet more spelljuice over friendly units. Now, hand the High Witch a Moonlit Glaive that confers a “mageblade” multiplier based on all that pent-up sorcery. The result should be a champion who looks like an ailing fortune teller yet can somehow dish out 300+ damage a turn, mulching the chewiest of chthonic crusaders in a single hit – and that’s before you exploit the ludicrous multipliers for your spells on Ekka’s floor, afforded by her conduit level.
True, she still has a glass jaw, and true, if she cops it, your wizardly arsenal will be proportionately punier. But you can head off those risks by wedging her behind a Silent Sentinel that absorbs damage while making foes even more susceptible to spells.
I gaze upon my willowy Wiccan wrecking ball with boundless, aching pride and satisfaction. And then I start to feel like Bilbo Baggins regaining his senses after beating a large woodlouse to death in Mirkwood. The appeal of the roguelite deckbuilder is the joy of expressing your wit and invention through alchemical mastery of maths. At best, it is like improvising a tune in response to haphazard melodies, dancing your own composition into the cadences of enemies and bosses.
At worst, it is like doing times-tables with fancier graphics – not that much fancier, in the case of Monster Train 2, which is readable and digestible, but badly needs a more interesting colour scheme and some more creative character designs. And even at its best, there’s a necessary hollowness to it, as anybody who’s ever yielded 100 hours of day and night to such games will know. The randomisation element sinks its blood-crusted hook, even as the glittery card effects make no bones of the genre’s adjacency to casino slot machines. Run gives way to run gives way to run.
Still, that’s more of a wider, philosophical objection to the genre than a criticism of Monster Train 2 in particular. If you have no such hoity-toity qualms, this is as bountiful an experience as you could ask for. Each victorious raid on heaven produces a shower of unlockable cards and items that you can put immediately to the test. If you’re weary of raiding the main campaign for cards, there are bespoke puzzle-campaigns via dimensional portal back at the starting depot, where you can test out various overarching modifiers. Or, if you really trust the hand you’ve amassed, you can segue your victory directly into Endless mode and extend this roguelike railway unto infinity. Heaven is only a fleeting fiction, next to the protean immensity of the deck.