Riding the Rails of Refinement in Monster Train 2

Monster Train 2Monster Train 2 is a lot like the first Monster Train. At first, I found these similarities to be a bit of a drag- why is this game a full sequel and not maybe a few new DLC factions? But then I played Monster Train 2..

. and played it, and played it, and played it. I was completely sucked in to the Roguelike loop, just like I was with the first game.



Is Monster Train 2 spectacularly original? Not especially. But is it engaging? That is undeniable.No TicketAll aboard for the basics! In Monster Train, you are in command of a magical train with 4 levels.

You position demons and angels (the titular monsters) on the bottom 3 floors. The top floor is your train engine, and if an enemy gets there, they can damage your engine core. If the core dies it’s game over.

Unlock some deckbuilders, the focus is not on amassing cards so much as improving them. You only get a few cards, but you have frequent opportunities to upgrade them with more strength or lower cost or something even more esoteric. Same goes for spell cards- you get a few, but there are plenty of opportunities to tweak the card basics.

Once a monster has been positioned on the train, it will stay there until the end of the fight, autobattling invaders until one side has perished.All of the factions in Monster Train 2 are brand new, and there are even some new card types. Equipment cards give you a chance to temporarily alter your monsters further.

My favorites are the room cards, which gives each floor of your train a new ability that persists for the fight. Extreme customization is the name of the game.Trick Out Your RideThat level of choice is a double-edged sword.

Really and truly, no two runs of Monster Train are quite alike. You are making so many decisions, and there are so many effects downstream of each little choice that the chaos of your proverbial butterfly wings means you are constantly at the center of a hurricane. Sometimes, I could feel my brain going into that good flow state, where I was making my decisions with very little conscious thought.

Sometimes I’d just kind of hope that my lower cost spells will mitigate the effects of a room that I applied to a new set of monsters. You get the idea- it’s complex!As a big fan of dozens of deckbuilders, I was a little bit frustrated (mostly with myself) that I couldn’t hold all the game rules in my head at the same time. This didn’t make the game unplayable- far from it, the game always stayed exciting! But that does mean that occasionally I was throwing cards and upgrades together not knowing definitively if my strategy was going to work for the long haul.

When you stack up a few status effects (with names like Rage, Valor, and Pyrogel) the game’s number calculations no longer quite work at a glance, so you are stuck doing a lot of arithmetic. Or you can make like me, do your thing, and hopefully live to find out.Train TerminalI played quite a bit of the first Monster Train.

It is probably one of my most played deckbuilders, up there with titles like Through the Obelisk and the king of the genre, Slay the Spire. So more Monster Train was always something I wanted. But some of the similarities do feel like a bit of a missed opportunity.

Like OK, your train used to go from the bottom of the screen towards the top. Now, it goes from top to bottom. Is that better? It’s different.

It’s something to get used to. But it’s not clearly a step in the right direction.Monster Train 2 boasts a bit more of a story than the first game complete with named characters and cutscenes.

It does that Hades trick where you can go around your home base between runs, and the characters get new things to say when you die. This is where the loop becomes undeniable. Because who doesn’t love constant unlocks.

Every run I end with new cards and relics. Sometimes I even get a new demon (or angel!) house. In the very least, the story will keep on chugging.

If you have been waiting to buy a ticket for the Monster Train, I feel confident that the sequel will prove to be an improvement on the original. Lessons were learned by the devs (and the players). There is a daunting number of variables in a Monster Train game, but ultimately, I’d rather go full steam into the chaos than languish in miserable certainty.

As Monster Train develops through early access, I’d expect it to become a new mainstay in the deckbuilding scene.***PC code provided by the publisher for preview***The post Riding the Rails of Refinement in Monster Train 2 appeared first on COGconnected..