Monster Train 2 proves that there was no need to reinvent the wheels on the Boneshaker train in order to relight the fires of this outstanding deckbuilding roguelike. (Not that they ever really went out – I’ve played the 2020 original almost daily for years.) It’s very similar to the roots of Monster Train, with a three-tiered tower defense structure where you optimize your unit placement and spells against incoming waves of invaders and choose your path along the tracks, though this time that path is headed from a re-lit Hell up to the gates of a corrupted Heaven instead of down. The five completely new clans have given me an enormous amount of toys to combine and experiment with as I build up momentum toward the final boss battle on each run, especially in tandem with the new equipment system that lets you mix and match parts, and a healthy number of other smart tweaks to the original’s incredibly replayable setup. In fact, Monster Train 2 is easily among the most compulsively replayable games that’ve ever gotten their hooks into me – I’ve already sunk over 90 hours into it (mostly on Steam Deck) with no sign of losing steam.
What makes each roughly hour-long run so gripping is that there are non-stop choices, and every one of them feels meaningful: which two factions will you pair up, which of your primary faction’s two champions do you take (and which of their three very different skill paths do you lean into), which Pyre Heart (with associated bonuses) do you slot in – and that’s before you draw a single card or choose a single game-altering artifact. All of those choices compound upon each other, and if you play your cards right and build synergies and combos you can become so wildly powerful that it feels as though you’ve completely broken something. But then, as you rank up and the enemies in subsequent runs become more powerful, it quickly becomes clear that if you don’t break it, it will break you. Like every great roguelike or roguelite, this isn’t a game you should expect to win every time, but every devastating loss makes the next win that much sweeter (and usually unlocks something new).
It’s so consistently interesting because of the intricate way all of the systems interact, from the simple positioning of your units so that the strong protect the weak to the extremely important order of operations to maximize the effects of your spell cards as you try to play as many as possible in a turn by reducing casting costs and generating more energy to spend. Figuring out which actions to take first can often spell the difference between winning and losing, and Monster Train 2 allows you to experiment much more than the original did by building in buttons to reset your turn or even restart a whole battle (which, in Monster Train 1, you kind of have to cheat to do). This will effectively put an asterisk next to your score on any leaderboard because knowing what’s coming gives you a huge advantage, but I’ve found it to be an invaluable tool to help me learn the best way to play my hand – and let me salvage some really fun builds from premature ends after I made a bad move. (For example, if I forget to use one of the new special abilities that some units have on a cooldown timer, such as a shield slam, a dragon’s fire breath, or potion brewing. Those frequently slipped my mind, even though there’s a prominent icon reminding me!)
Randomness will always play a huge role in a game like this – sometimes I end up with a weak deck that bites the dust in the first or second battle (even after a few retries), sometimes it’s dynamite out of the gate but then gets utterly destroyed by a boss that counters my strengths. (It does tell you at the start of a run which major bosses you’ll face, so you can plan to counter them if you think ahead.) But one thing that makes Monster Train 2 at least a bit more predictable than the original is that there is now always a deployment phase at the beginning of every battle, guaranteeing that you’ll have a chance to plop down at least a few units before the action starts. Especially if you’re packing a deck full of spell cards and buffs, it’s reassuring to know that you aren’t going to end up without anybody to cast them on for several turns.
A new layer of complexity is added in the form of Equipment cards, which let you buff a unit with more attack and defense, plus special abilities like growing Spikes when you’re attacked, Trample, Life Steal, or building more permanent attack power with every kill, to name a few. Some of those interact in awesome ways with a unit’s natural abilities, and you can even combine two pieces into one in order to, for example, create a weapon that both expands the capacity on a floor with every kill but also grows the equipped unit every turn, making them dramatically more powerful. As long as they keep scoring kills, they’ll always have room to keep growing. And because these equipment cards are shuffled back into your deck every battle, you’re encouraged to swap them around to different unit types for different effects (or you can pay to upgrade one so that it’s consistently available in the deployment phase).
On top of that are the new Room cards, which can be used to enhance each of your three floors with special effects. Some simply make your guys do +15 damage with every attack, others give them stat boosts on summon or Reanimation (the more you die, the stronger you get), one nukes everything on that floor for 50 damage each turn, one makes spells cheaper, another makes them more powerful, and one gives you cash for everything that dies there. That’s just a sampling of them, and they’re another rich opportunity to augment your characters with even more complex piles of modifiers and multipliers.
Another new swappable part is the Pyre Heart of your train itself, which sits on the fourth floor of your train and serves as your persistent health bar. It can now be swapped out at the beginning of a run to either give you a once-per-battle boost like a few points of energy or freezing your cards in place for the next round, or radically alter your run by ditching the standard starting cards and letting you draw some randoms to replace them. There are a bunch of these to unlock and try out, which further shakes up future runs.
All of that lays the groundwork for the colorful new clans themselves. These five factions are just as amusingly goofy looking and smartly designed as those that came before them, and there’s no end to the fantastic combos you can come up with by combining their special abilities. They have too many fun things about them to list – literal volumes of guides will be written about how to use them at high levels – but my favorite to play as has to be the fungus-based Underlegion: many of their units and spells can build up huge stacks of damage-over-time Decay (similar to Frostbite) that melts enemies to puddles of goo, or they can focus on spawning increasingly powerful stacks of mushroom soldiers – and sometimes, when the stars align, the act of spawning mushroom soldiers triggers huge stacks of Decay and Sap to render enemies toothless as they die.
The mad scientist-themed Lazarus League are my runners-up. They’re largely focused on the new gear system, and their roster includes several units with one hit point that come with equipment grafted to them. When they die, it becomes available to attach to anybody else, giving them a fun Frankenstein’s Monster theme I love to play with. If that’s not your style, though, you can focus on potion mixing to create increasingly powerful cocktails that grant Rage, Regeneration, Sap, or Unstable (which makes a unit explode if its health drops below the number of stacks), often with side effects like damage shields, Frostbite, and Resurrection, which instantly brings a unit back from the dead with one HP.
Sometimes I’ll let fate decide by randomizing my selection, and I’m never sad when it lands on the Pyreborne dragons because their thirst for gold funds all the unit, spell, and gear upgrades money can buy if you can stack Avarice (granting money from every attack). Alternatively, you can focus on Pyregel, which increases the damage an enemy takes with each stack. With either of those approaches, you’ll also earn golden eggs that can be cashed in for bonus artifacts between battles, or held onto for bonuses for certain units that are more powerful the more eggs you have in your cache.
Then you have the Banished, fallen angels who focus mostly on building up Valor (basically a new spin on Rage) to buff both damage and, for the front unit, armor generation. Some units earn Valor by moving, so using spells and abilities to shift them from front to back or between floors creates a highly mobile style of play that’s completely unique to them, while others build Valor through Revenge – which triggers whenever they take damage – creating damage sponges who get spongier (and hit harder) the more they soak up.
Finally, there’s the magic-focused Luna Coven, who, like the Stygian Guard before them, are my personal weakest faction because I’m not as good at building spell damage as I am buffing up a juggernaut unit. Even so, I’ve found success with them by making use of units that build their power with every Moon Cycle – the moon alternates between full and new every turn, with each phase granting bonuses to certain units, like attack boosts or sweep during a full moon. That is, it alternates every turn unless you meddle with it using spells and abilities to run up that score, affecting all units you have deployed who like when it switches from one to the other. They can also specialize in building up Conduit stacks on units that serve to amplify their spell power on that floor, and if you slot in a Mage Blade weapon it enhances their attack as well.
Naturally, all units can be upgraded twice by default from options in shops, and when you mix in some special options that you can only get out of a random event, it leads to some truly wild combos. One of my favorites I’ve done was to upgrade a Pyreborne Gildmonger dragon, who is a weak fighter but gives you a golden egg when he dies, with the Endless power. That lets you get him killed every turn to cash in on those eggs – but even better was lucking into the Worthy Sacrifice upgrade afterwards, which gave him a special ability that let me kill him off myself in exchange for more action points to use for other things that same turn. Then I duplicated that card a few times. Things got really crazy by the end of that run, but it still wasn’t enough to get me more than two battles deep into the new Endless Mode – the challenge ramps up to insanity in the second post-final boss battle, and I haven’t been able to beat the third… yet.
On top of the traditional customizable runs with increasing challenge tiers that unlock every time you beat one (up to 10) and randomized Daily Challenges that throw in three often dramatic game-changing mutators, there are also a set of 21 hand-built Dimensional Challenges to play through. Those range in difficulty from pushover to a couple I had to try multiple times just to get started, but they do unlock some extra stuff, like new Pyre Hearts and the ability to cosmetically customize your train’s three floors. I wouldn’t say they’re vastly different from the mutators you’d get from a Daily Challenge, but I’m all for more ways to play. It’s a little odd that there doesn’t seem to be a leaderboard for each of these standardized tests of skill, but I’ll be able to make do with the boards for the Community Challenges, which anybody can custom-build themselves.
Finally, there’s a bit more story this time than the first game’s simple setup, told through visual novel-style cutscenes you can watch between runs. We do get a little drama between the fallen angel Fel and her corrupted brother Seraph that’s taken seriously as the gang seeks to retake Heaven from the Titans who conquered it, but the rest of it is just goofiness between the greedy dragons, honorable mushrooms, wacky Frankenstein monsters, etc. It’s not bad at all, just kind of superfluous next to other innovative roguelike storytelling like that of Hades or Blue Prince, and given that it’s not voiced or fully animated it’s hard for there to be a break-out personality among them. Given that it’s entirely optional to read, though, there’s no harm in building a little bit of character around this cast of monsters and their creative cartoonish designs. Along with another excellent soundtrack of jaunty music, there’s plenty of personality on display.
Overall, there’s just a tremendous amount of content here – especially because (spoiler alert for anybody who's been following the trailers, plans to play this already, and likes surprises!) it turns out that Shiny Shoe has pulled a Left 4 Dead 2 and included all five of the original Monster Train clans alongside the five new ones. (The only one missing at launch is the Wurmkin, which were added in an expansion.) So there are actually 10 clans to choose from, for a total of 45 potential pairs – as compared to just 10 pairings for five clans. Getting to play as the Umbra, Hellhorned, Awoken, Stygian Guard, and Melting Remnant with all these new systems makes this feel like the only Monster Train I really need (though I do miss the unit-combining power from the expansion).
