Monster Train - The Good, The Bad, The Questionable

Monster Train is a deck building rogue like developed by Shiny Shoe. Released in 2020, Monster Train reminds us that the best part of public transport is the guy on meth who swears he's an angel here to destroy you.

We play as the director of a Hellbound train on a quest to get everyone home safely.

Gameplay involves dying to the boss after an hour of carefully curating your deck because you didn't pay attention to what their special attack is. It even tells you before the run begins. "Don't do a thin deck, it won't work!" Good thing I never learned to read, thin deck here we gooooo.

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The Good

I really enjoyed the "dual-class" approach to deck building, giving you effectively dozens of possible starting points. Finding broken combos or trying desperately to figure out how to make the shitty ones viable was a lot of fun. Each combination also having a 'hero unit' that comes in a variety of flavors adds even more layers of complexity that I had a ton of fun figuring out.

I was also a big fan of the card enchant system. With spells the correct choice is almost always 'reduce the card energy cost', but with troops it wasn't always so cut and dry. Gave me a little more control over the RNG so that I only had myself to blame when I inevitably made a poor choice and lost. Of course I still blamed bullshit RNG though, that's half the fun of the genre.

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Favorite Screenshot

https://i.imgur.com/QnBqK5I.png

"Where we're going, we don't need any energy."

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The Bad

The boss fights feel anti-climatic. After a few rounds you get into a drunken boxing match where you just smash into each other until only one of you has HP left. You just sit there for a minute while the game maths out if you won or not. It also narrows down what kind of strategies are viable because you don't get to play cards while this goes on.

As such you can't build around damage spells since you don't meaningfully get to use them. Almost every deck build I did the chief strategy was get rid of damage spells and get the really good buff spells. "Stack the shit out damage immunity" became my mantra as I got to higher difficulty levels and it pretty much always worked.

To the games credit sometimes you stack armor buffing spells instead. There's even a spell damage card that does your 5x your armor in damage to the enemy and it's one of the only damage spells that do anything useful. Calling that a spell damage build though is a little like when I used to tell my 5 year old 'we' made cookies because he pushed the bake button on the oven.

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The Questionable

As neat as the deck building itself can be at times, the enemy variety is sorely lacking. The art for enemies is all very samey which is one issue. Very few units stand out as having their own identity. If you showed me a lineup of every enemy unit I'd be hard pressed to tell you exactly what they do or what any of them are even called.

This leads to the game feeling stale far sooner than it should have. It's like they spent all their budget on making cool decks for the players but forgot that I also want cool monsters to slay.

You know the old saying. It's not the size of the hammer, it's the nail you're stacking HP leech against so that when the final fight happens you can one floor it thanks to being pragmatically invulnerable.

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Final Thoughts

It was a fun distraction for a few days but as much fun as I had trying out different decks, fighting the same monsters in the same order every time got dull. I managed to beat the hardest difficulty and then lost all will to keep playing. Though less than 5% of players have the Steam achievement for beating the highest difficulty so it would seem I'm a masochist.

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Bonus Thought

There's a PvP mode that's been dead for quite some time. I wonder if the folks who played it for the last time knew they were the last ones to ever play that mode. I wonder if there are any games where I was the last one to ever play it.

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Thank you for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts. What did you think of the game? Did you have a similar experience or am I off my rocker?

My other reviews on patient gaming