This brilliantly strategic roguelike challenges you to build a whole city on wheels and keep it one step ahead of an unending horde of monsters

I'm afraid it's that time again when I have to break out a bowl of genre word salad. Brace yourself.

Monsters Are Coming! Rock & Road is a survival, resource-gathering, tower defence, roguelike, city-builder, Vampire Survivors-like. Phew.

Ok, now that's out of the way, we can break down what that actually means. Basically, in each run you are the custodian of a city on wheels, as it rolls along pursued by ever-escalating hordes of monsters. Your character has auto-firing weapons, like in Vampire Survivors, but so does the city. Instead of adding to your arsenal, level ups allow you to add more buildings, from towers to farmland to factories, all feeding into your defence.

If your hero dies, you simply place a grave in your city and spawn a new one—but if your city takes too many hits, it crumbles, and the run is over.

So guarding your home as it trundles along is vital… but you're also encouraged to risk breaking away to explore. Out at the edges of the 'road' can be found trees, rocks, and gold ore, all useful in your quest. Feed wood into the city and the attack speed of all towers gradually increases, while stone is used to repair any damage, and gold can buy more buildings at intermittent merchants.

It makes for an interesting push and pull as you balance keeping the city safe with nipping off to punch some trees—risky as it is, those extra resources make all the difference as the journey gets more dangerous. Though it never stops being a panic-inducing moment when a warning flashes up letting you know that in your absence, the city's gotten stuck on a boulder or a root and stopped rolling while the hordes descend on it.

The real meat of the game, though, is in the building. With only a limited grid of tiles to play with, clever town planning is key—but with three random buildings to choose from each level up, you're also forced to adapt and chase whatever synergies present themselves.

Finding strong combinations isn't exactly complicated, but it is satisfying—whether you're using laborers to increase the area of effect of your mortar explosions to absurd levels of mass destruction, or summoning unending armies of undead minions buffed by crypts and reliquaries.

Interestingly, you also have to consider the resulting shape of your city. Extending to your maximum width is great for covering a large area with your towers, but it also makes the city a bigger target for enemies, and more likely to snag on trees and boulders you forgot to clear. And whether you prioritise damage at the front, back, or sides, or try to spread your defences thinly across your whole border, dictates where you'll need to focus your hero's efforts during massed attacks.

Different city types, unlockable as you progress, offer unique challenges suited to different playstyles. The Mirror City, for example, is perfect for those who crave perfect order—place a building on one side of it, and it gets duplicated on the other, so you're always symmetrical. But those buildings are debuffed to make up for it, and you'll find you run out of space far quicker than other cities, so the trick is working out which things benefit most from being doubled and which will fall behind.

With 10 city types to dig into and a ton of different buildings, I've been really enjoying exploring all the different combos so far. Progression is a little more awkward than I'd like—a lot of stuff is locked behind completing fairly awkward challenges, and the best way to keep earning new stuff is often unclear. But so far that hasn't stopped me coming back again and again with my latest ideas for new deadly architectural abominations.

Monsters Are Coming is available on Steam now, and 10% off until December 4.