Monster Train 2 Review – A Hellbound Ride Worth Repeating

Monster Train 2 Review

At first glance, you would be forgiven for thinking Monster Train 2 looks a lot like its predecessor. Sure, it’s a little sharper, and a little spiffier. Some of the core demons look pretty similar to the ones we depended on last time we rode a train to hell. But as you get deeper into the deckbuilding mechanics, you realize that Monster Train 2 is far deeper and more complex than its predecessor.

All Aboard

In Monster Train, you are steering the titular locomotive through roguelike rewards on a track through hell. In the first game you fought angels; this time you fight titans. The angels in fact, are your friend and a lot of the fun in the game comes from mixing and matching angelic and infernal cards. Many cards represent the other half of the title- the monsters. As you progress you’ll also pick up cards for spells, equipment and upgrades for your train.

Enemies spawn in the bottom floor and climb their way up to the fourth level where your engine is located. (I would actually love a cutscene where the engineer justified this peculiar layout.) You build and command your defense squad. Monster Train stands apart from most other deckbuilders by focusing less on accumulating cards and more on updating the ones you have, sometimes creating a really broken monster that punches way above its weight class. If you’ve never played Monster Train but are familiar with other deckbuilders, I’m sure you get the picture.

What’s Your Story?

On this outing, Shiny Shoe took inspiration from another popular roguelike- Hades. The named characters in this game are a lot more interesting than the barely extant leaders of the demon clans in the first Monster Train. Each time your run comes to an end, you come back to the original train platform and enjoy some dialogue from the brittle angel/demon alliance. This ties cards and clans you unlock to an ongoing story that dragged me in, despite my efforts to get back to the gameplay loop.

In updating your monsters, you will come familiar with a lot of keywords representing new powers. This is par for the course in these kinds of card games, but Monster Train piles it on pretty thick. I’m sure you can wrap your head around a status like poisoned or bleeding, but what are you going to do with an ability called pyregel? Are you sure you remember what attuning a card does?

I found this vocab to be a double edged sword. On the one hand, the originality is refreshing. On the other hand, it’s a lot to remember. As such, the learning curve in Monster Train 2 is pretty steep, and it demands a lot of your attention to take in a flurry of information. The UI is well designed and you can simply mouse over any keywords for a detailed reminder of what everything means. But that’s a lot of words on the screen at the same time.

Looks Like Our Ride

The models and animations in Monster Train 2 share a familiar art style with the last game, but you can nevertheless see the growth of the art team, who design some pretty memorable little devil guys. The various dragons and snakemen are pretty cool and the grifter cats who run all the shops are super cool and going to be your new best friends. Your eyes soak in a lot of details, and along with the dialogue, you get a fair bit of worldbuilding.

Even when you aren’t managing every little thing, Monster Train 2 is hard to put down. Throwing cute demons into little squads, and playing every spell card in your hand has the punch you’d want it to. You can speed up the actual back and forth blows- speed it up to an almost ludicrous degree. But that’s a sure when to go cross-eyed from the tiny text and torrents of flame that slash across your train cars.

As sequels go, this is what I hoped to see after playing a lot of Monster Train on my Switch and PC- more Monster Train. And the devs really proved their creativity in this game, coming up with some truly mind-bending card combinations, and a fun story that holds the chaos together. I’ve played quite a bit of the game, and I can tell that I still have tons of cards to unlock. I anticipate that Monster Train 2 stays in my rotation for a good long time.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***