LogFAQs > #968680978

#3: Monster Train

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/2/4/AAA-H0AADxb8.jpg

Back in late 2017, Slay the Spire was released. Now, some people will tell you that Slay the Spire was really released in 2019, but don't listen to them; that's just when it came out of early access. For you normies who don't have nearly 1500 hours in Slay the Spire, sure, maybe that suffices. But I got into Spire in 2017, and it almost completely dominated my life for the entirety of 2018. I had kind of a rough year, and Slay the Spire ended up being my biggest comfort game; I played it whenever I needed to relax and clear my head, which was basically all the time. Too much of the time, probably.

I started playing it before the Defect was even part of the game; I played it through the Defect's early release, beta art and all, and I played through plenty of balance changes and minor upgrades. By the time the game was fully released in 2019, I was actually pretty played out of it. Sure, I came back for the Watcher, the fourth character, who ended up being really cool and sucking me back in for a couple hundred hours. But while most people were still discovering this game in 2019 and 2020, and even to this day, I was played out of this one by 2020. I occasionally go back to it, but I got what I wanted out of it for the most part. I needed a new fix. Enter Monster Train, which would eventually pull off an unbelievable trick - it would get me to play what is basically a Slay the Spire variant and get sucked into it for over 1000 hours all over again.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/2/5/AAA-H0AADxb9.jpg

Monster Train is initially pretty unassuming, and I nearly passed on it originally. It'd be hard to blame you if the game looks like some kinda wannabe mobile game; something about the logo and the visuals give off an annoying vibe that at best, sells Hearthstone, and at worst sells Clash of Clans or something. The game's visuals aren't actually that bad, really, but the game's first impression is weak, and combined with a name that is very direct but not very attention-grabbing, I could see a lot of people completely overlooking this game. Slay the Spire pounced and landed in an absolutely dominant niche, setting an entirely new trend for indie games by successfully replicating a Dominion-like deckbuilder game in a video game format; there was nothing like it on the market, and it demanded attention. Monster Train looks like a cheap knockoff, at best.

But make no mistake; Monster Train is no cheap knockoff. It IS a knockoff, yes; the devs admitted as such, and seem to have felt so guilty about it that they actually offered a sale for anyone who already owns Spire, which is cool. It makes sense, as people who own Spire are more likely to be interested in Monster Train, while... already having Spire to play. But the foundations of Monster Train are absolutely rock solid; as much as the mechanics seem to borrow from Slay the Spire almost 1 to 1 at times, it really takes these and put its own twist on them, while also in a lot of ways actually smoothing out some of the things I don't like about Spire. This game demands every bit as much attention as Spire gets.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/2/6/AAA-H0AADxb-.jpg

If you're familiar with the Slay the Spire format then Monster Train will be easy to understand, but I'll recap. Slay the Spire is a sort of deckbuilding roguelike RPG; you fight through a series of monster battles using a deck of cards, which starts out weak and shitty but grows more powerful over time as you add more cards to it, while also collecting helpful items. Monsters fight you by showing what attacks they will perform, and you can respond by playing cards up to your energy level to attack them or block their attacks, until you reduce them to 0 hp. Any hp you lose is carried over to the next fight as you travel down a branching map of various risks and rewards, and chances to recover your hp can be few and far between. Eventually, you fight bosses, and eventually you either win, or you die and start all over.

Okay, so that's also exactly how Monster Train works, except it's a game where you summon creatures, and they fight monsters sort of like a tower defense game. You're on a train that's travelling to a destination, and you must outlive timed waves of enemies as it arrives. There are three floors to your train, all of which you can summon creatures to to try to stop your enemies' assault; with each turn the enemies survive, they climb up a floor of the train until they reach the pyre, the glowing hot core that powers the train, which serves as your hp for the run. You want to let as few monsters get by you, zero if possible, on your way to eventually fighting the final boss. As you go along, you add more creature cards to your deck, as well as spell cards which can be played directly onto your creatures or theirs for various effects, as well as gaining items that improve your abilities, and you go through a map of branching paths that lead to different rewards. Again, it's Slay the Spire, but with monsters, on a train.