Monster Train 2 review

I’ve been more hyped for this sequel than I am for the return of Christ. And if you didn’t care for that bit of blasphemy, then Monster Train, a game about helping the demons of Hell defeat the goody two-shoes of Heaven, is likely not for you. Everyone else, though, should get ready to play a roguelike deckbuilder that’s every bit the equal to Slay the Spire and Balatro.

Hyperbole? Hardly. Monster Train was one of 2020’s few pleasant surprises. A game that shamelessly ripped off smartly built on Slay the Spire’s structure with a welcome layer of tower defence.

Structurally, this sequel is near-identical. You still occupy a fancy four-floor train, with a fragile pyre you need to protect occupying the top floor. Every turn several enemies rudely break into your train via floor one. The fools telegraph exactly how they’re going to attack so you can plan accordingly, and any surviving enemy at the end of each turn ascends one floor closer to that crucial pyre.

To defend it, you have a deck of spells and the all-important monsters that you strategically place on each floor of the train. It’s often as chaotic—and exhilarating—as playing three games of Slay the Spire at once.

Each deck is made up of a unique clan of monsters, and these are what had had the original Monster Train troubling ‘best deckbuilder ever’ lists.

I adored the Melting Remnant, a zombie-like race of candle people who could temporarily be brought back from the dead. Other monsters in that same deck had a ‘harvest’ ability, which buffed them whenever a monster died. This was such a brilliant fit with a deck full of constantly-returning undead that it managed to make zombies feel fresh in a videogame again.

And Monster Train 2’s most audacious move is to take all those brilliant cards and tear most of them up.

Fresh hell

Start the game, and the decks that introduced you to the first Monster Train are nowhere to be seen. Instead, you get the Pyreborn, a clan of gold-hoarding dragons, and the Banished, angels who are now working with the forces of Hell. The Pyrebound can cover enemy units in pyregel, which increases the damage they’ll take. They also gain Dragon’s Hoard, a new currency that can be exchanged for increasingly generous rewards.

Both these ideas are immediately more interesting than the Hellborn that opened the last game, whose cards were easily the most simple. That’s because they were more a tutorial deck to get you up to speed, something Monster Train 2 could justly be accused of lacking. Still, there’s worse sins for a sequel to commit than being overexcited to show you new stuff.

Like the other starter deck, the Banished, which is all about constantly moving units and gaining valor.

Valor is a buff that gives more attack power, and at the end of each turn more armor, but only if they’re at the front. So if you want that armor bonus, you’re going to have to risk putting your poor monsters directly into the line of fire.

I’m not planning on visiting Hell myself, so I won’t spoil every new clan, but I’m hopelessly in love with the Underlegion. They’re sentient mushrooms whose powers revolve around spawning and decaying. Certain cards will spawn a funguy, a laughably weak lil shroom who at least serves as an effective shield for my more important monsters.

Except spawning more funguy on the same floor doesn’t add another. It ‘stacks’, essentially buffing the first funguy with more health and strength. Another monster has the power to spawn two more funguy stacks at the end of every turn, and another gives the funguy an attack boost and the ability to ‘trample’, which means any overflowing damage from a successful enemy-slaying will carry over to the next. Steadily you can Magikarp your funguy into a monster that rivals anything in the game.

Decay is a nasty status effect that inflicts a set amount of damage every turn. Lots of the Underlegions monsters and spells can inflict it, but one monster in particular, my special horrid mushroom boy, inflicts three decay on all enemies every time you summon a monster. Oh, and spawning another stack of funguy absolutely counts as a summon. I can’t tell you how many runs I’ve lost because I’ve been stubbornly trying to create a self-sustaining engine of spawning and decaying that means no foe will even get a glimpse of my pyre.

Monster Train 2 is full of these delightful synergies. Each run is played with two clan decks combined, so the fun comes from trying to discover and create them. What if I used the Banished clan with the Underlegions? A clan that offers armor bonuses to the front unit and a clan that’s all about making an increasingly strong front unit has to be a match made in Hell, right?

The best synergies feel like you’ve broken the game. Occasionally you have, but Monster Train remains the master of tricking you into feeling like you’re playing a duller deckbuilder with all the cheats on. Between bouts you’ll be offered incredible rewards, like the ability to clone almost any card in your deck, or upgrades to your monsters like multistrike or huge boosts in attack power. Artifacts, powerful talismans with potentially battle-winning power-ups (think Balatro’s jokers), are also unlimited and often handed out like sweets.

But the game is no pushover. For every gift it gives, it brutally counters with a terrific new bestiary of enemies and bosses.

One flies between floors, doing instant damage to the pyre if it finds no monsters there—a clever reprimand of my foolish ‘just ignore the other two floors and focus on one’ strategy. Some opponents gain a truly horrible amount of power every time they climb a floor or you play a spell card. But because the game has given you so much power, it rarely feels unfair.

Which bosses you face changes between runs too, keeping things feeling fresh. All true of the last game, but the fact they’ve been able to introduce five great new clans along with new artifacts, spells, enemies and curveballs without breaking that balance makes for one Hell of an encore.

Forgiven sins

A new undo button is a godsend, even if I can no longer blame a misplaced click for screwing up. There’s also now a deployment phase where you have access to most of the monsters in your deck and can play them before the battle starts properly. It's a great change that cuts down on the RNG massively. Do you really want to lose because God decided you were only going to draw spell cards for the first three turns?

New room cards set a rule on an entire floor, like bonus energy when units die, or a wonderfully risky one that deals 50 damage to everyone at the end of each turn. Equipment cards are also new, offering permanent buffs when applied. Stick an equipment card that grants multistrike on one of your monsters and you can likely guess what happens next. Ah, but Monster Train never met a simple game mechanic that it couldn’t resist complicating and pumping full of steroids.

So there’s a new clan of mad scientists, with grunts that drop valuable equipment upon death, encouraging you to kill your own monsters. There’s also a monster who gains attack power and health every time you attach some equipment to it, and this boost persists between battles. Will I ever learn to stop screwing myself over because I can’t resist the Faustian bargain of persistent buffs? Maybe in Monster Train 3…

Let’s take a break from all this praise for a moment to talk about the story. All two of you who were hoping for a more narrative-heavy Monster Train sequel are in luck. The rest of us have to click through several cutscenes that occasionally pop up between runs, or ‘comedy’ vignettes between the characters. None of this is terrible, but I much preferred the last game’s storytelling, where you got hints of its wider world through chance encounters on runs, or creatures near the track you could click on for more lore if you wanted it.

Anyone hoping for a revolution will also admittedly be disappointed. This is definitely a sequel that adds new ideas to the old train engine, rather than trying something completely original. But Monster Train’s terrific locomotive didn’t need an overhaul, and when there’s so many brilliant ideas in the huge roster of new cards, it feels churlish to complain. Sixty hours in and I still feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. Slay the Spire 2 might have to grant access to actual Heaven to top this.