Oh, yeah, baby, that's the good stuff.

Slay the Spire turned me into a roguelike deckbuilding junkie. After logging 400+ hours in it, I've been on a two-year journey through a bunch of other games in the genre. I've played a lot of good ones, but this one deserves special mention. The Slay the Spire inspiration is definitely there, but it clearly served as more of a jumping off-point into its own game, and deserves to be talked about on the strength of its fresh new ideas alone, because it has a ton, and a lot of them are just fantastic.

First, the deckbuilding itself. Monster Train very clearly understands what makes a deckbuilder fun, and is built off of the idea of finding crazy unexpected synergies between its cards, artifacts, and champions. It chooses to focus on multiplicative scaling as opposed to additive, and it gives you a lot of control over which cards and units you choose to lean into with its upgrade system. You get to make a bunch of decisions constantly, and you're challenged to find the highest-value options out of a lot of interesting ones. The game is decently challenging, and if you make good calls, you're rewarded handsomely with crazy emergent synergies that just feel really awesome to pull off. But, the encounters scale exponentially too, and if you don't keep up, the denizens of Heaven are going to overpower you and shatter the last remnants of your Pyre.

The tower defense aspect of the encounters changes the flow up quite a bit as well, asking you interesting questions about what units go in which lanes. At first, it seems like a no-brainer to just shove all your big dudes into one lane and kill things before they can even get further in, but the bosses challenge you not to do that. All it takes is one time for a wave to catch you off-guard and break through the floor where you invested all of your power to understand the tactical importance of having a plan for every lane.

The presentation is great, and each faction has a strong identity in both its visuals and mechanics. My personal favorite is the Melting Remnant, literal candle people that burn out after a while, but use graveyard recursion effects to re-form new bodies out of wax and come back stronger. The music is good too, an enjoyable soundtrack that's consistent enough to be thematic, but also just varied enough to stay interesting.

The only thing on my wishlist right now is more encounter variety. You fight the same bosses in the same order every run, but they have different crests that change the mechanics of the fights significantly. However, it still feels like the same boss, and you might have to change your tactics turn-to-turn, but you don't have to build significantly differently to handle them. But, that's probably something that's more noticeable to someone like me (who's no-lifed this game for four days straight), as opposed to someone who plays a little more casually.

I could say more, but you get the idea, I think. A lot of this should be experienced for yourself, and if you even have a passing interest in the idea of this game, you should definitely pick this up. I've played a lot of good games in this genre, but this is the first one that I've logged almost 40 hours in in four days.

tl;dr: game good, strongly recommend

From a pure gameplay design perspective, I think Monster Train is weaker than Slay the Spire. It's loud and flashy, but the game is mostly won at the strategy layer, where it's a game of matching units and spells to the upgrades they need to be effective. Individual battles generally don't involve a lot of skill. The switch from drawing being abundant and energy being very rare to drawing being very rare and energy being abundant means it's common for the player to dump their entire hand every turn.

But despite both being deckbuilders with clear, focused, well-communicated design, Monster Train is aiming for a different experience. Slay the Spire is about assembling a toolbox, where you will never be more than a few suboptimal choices away from defeat. That's incredible game design, but it can also be stressful. Monster Train is a game about figuring out how to make yourself invincible using the components the game has given you.

I've put 200 hours into both games and while I give the edge to StS, I enjoyed every minute of Monster Train and I can see how someone else might prefer it.

Most of the top reviews already cover what makes this game great, but I wanted to make sure potential buyers knew that they have options to turn off the moving backgrounds and camera shake.

If you like roguelites, buy this game.
If you like Slay the Spire, buy this game.
If you like [insert any strategy game], buy this game.

I was primarily a Magic the Gathering content creator, and this game hooked me so deep that I became a content creator for it. This gets my highest recommendation.

With one of the trends these days being every developer and their cat wanting to make their game into a deckbuilder, the market is pretty flooded after the success of Slay the Spire. When there are many cheaply-made Slay the Spire clones, you have to ask, "Ok but why should I even consider this one?

For sake of space, I'll make the assumption you know the basics of deckbuilders.

What makes Monster Train different?

1. 5 demon clans to choose from, and each run you pick TWO!
   
   This allows for SO much variation in the game. Mix and match the various strengths of each clan to make different strategies. Each clan has its own thematic and mechanical flavor. For example, the first two clans, Hellhorned (Red) and Awoken (Green): Red brings heavy hitters, direct damage spells, rage buffs and mischievous imps which have fun effects on summon, while Green brings sturdy blockers, swift attackers, stat buffs, thorns, and healing / regeneration spells.
   
   
2. Which clan you pick as your primary vs secondary makes a difference!
   
   Every clan has a "Champion" unit which you start with at the beginning of every run. So, whichever clan you have as your primary, you'll get that clan's champion. This means that in terms of unique combinations, there are TWENTY to choose from! (And who knows, probably more clans later? We'll see) Note that these champions can be upgraded during the course of a run from three different upgrades. You can choose to go with just one upgrade path, or even choose to mix two of them together. This as well helps give more variety on how you build your deck.
   
   
3. The gameplay mixes deckbuilder adventure with tower defense concepts.
   
   As you probably saw in the store screenshots, there are three floors (and the pyre room) to your train. Enemies (usually) enter in from the bottom and work their way up. It's up to you to defend them from reaching the pyre and extinguishing it by building up your floors with strong monsters and slinging some spells. I find this to be a nice change of pace compared to just a single hero facing off against a room of enemies (not that there's anything wrong with that).
   
   
4. Instead of the usual method of upgrading cards (from base version to upgraded), Monster Train opts for a more-customized approach, with each card having a base of two upgrade slots, allowing you to enhance your cards in a more-specialized fashion. These upgrades can be quite simple in nature, such as extra attack and health for your monsters or extra effectiveness for your spells; or even more potent options, such as extra attacks, or spells returning to your hand the next turn after you play them. You can obtain these upgrades from shops, and even some special ones from events.
   
   
5. Choosing your pathway in your run is a lot simpler.
   
   Using Slay the Spire as an example, you'd usually need to make a lot of decisions evaluating which pathway you want to take. In Monster Train, however, there are just a set number of encounters, and between each fight there is an A / B split of the track to decide upon. Each side will have some bonuses and/or shops, so you only need to make a "this or that" decision each area. In my opinion, this makes your run a bit more "fluid / flexible" so you can choose based on how the run is going instead of being "stuck" on a path you chose awhile ago.

Because I always advocate research before purchasing, I'd recommend checking out some gameplay on Youtube or Twitch to make sure it's something which you'd really want. For myself, I had heard about this project awhile ago and got involved with testing (hence product received for free) and have thoroughly enjoyed my time with it. Lastly, the kicker is that the developers care a lot about this game and have plans to support it for awhile with content and balance updates, so things will hopefully only get better as time goes on.

You want "a different take on deckbuilder adventure games"? Give this one a shot.

Got this game because of Northernlion, Loved watching it, and loving playing it. Can't wait to see everything it has to offer, and then see what else comes after.

For a fan of rogue-like deckbuilders, a must-play. Best described as Slay the Spire's younger, happy-go-lucky brother.

Replayability is high, owing to the simple trick of creating multiple sub-factions, letting you pick two to combine and then keeping track of successful runs for each combination. But this breath of options comes with a price: in contrast to StS's tight balance, in Monster Train anything goes. The degree to which the game allows you to break the mechanics is absurd, but that also means there's a number of runs that from the word go basically have no shot of making it to the end, doomed to die at the first boss. At least, that's my experience at the middling difficulty level.

Some runs are impossible to get going, some runs are impossible to lose. Most runs have you searching for the seam to exploit and crack open. If a Slay the Spire with higher highs and lower lows sounds appealing to you, it's an easy recommendation. If you're interested in trying out a rogue-like deckbuilder for the first time, it's also an attractive entry point that doesn't take itself too serious and isn't afraid to have fun.

Easy recommendation.

I have 200 hours on Slay the Spire (StS) and 70 hours on this game. I have a little bit of a history with card games, playing Netrunner for many years (never did get into Magic, though) and I consider board gaming to be one of my primary hobbies. Context for my review (I make quite a few comparisons to StS in here).

Monster Train is a rogue-like, creature combat, deck drafting game, essentially. "Heroes" are your units that battle the enemy units. You play them to occupy floors. You can think of the floors as almost a "lane" system, with enemies advancing from the bottom floor, to the middle, to the top floor each after a single combat round. Hopefully you kill them before they reach the top. Eventually, a boss will show up. The boss stops at each floor, from the bottom up, and rounds of combat are continuous until the floor is cleared or the boss is dead. Any units that overflow your top floor attack your "pyre" (like your health pool). The pyre has an attack value and will fight back a bit in continuous rounds of combat until its health runs out or the attackers die. When you run out of pyre health it's game over.

This is a great drafting game. The structure of the drafting is interesting. The majority of your drafting is for support spells and minor monsters. You are only able to draft a limited number of heroes during special draft events, and those drafts are front-loaded in your run. You fairly quickly have to figure out what your limited hero-pool will be and how to best synergize your team. From there you have to make sure that the support cards you draft match your hero makeup. This helps keep things a bit fresher, as most cards are situationally good and there aren't always the same "best value" cards in every run. I like this in contrast to StS, where it often feels like I'm trying for the same builds or using the same cards every time. You can further upgrade your cards to really customize how your deck is working. Many of my runs came together as I put powerful upgrades on particularly synergistic spells or heroes. And boy, when you find a power combo, it REALLY goes off in this game and that feels quite satisfying.

Card draw tends to be somewhat limited, so it's important to be choosy about what you draft-- you don't need a card from every draft pack! Thin decks are better decks, and card removal is also relatively plentiful in Monster Train. This is in contrast to StS, where sometimes it make more sense to dilute the "bad" cards in your deck by drafting large and playing best-value. I like that this game has you focus on making a "tighter" deck. The decision points at each draft opportunity feel a bit more impactful for it.

I had waned on Slay the Spire due to the same-ness that a lot of my runs felt. How similar my drafting strategy was as certain builds just seemed blatantly better than others. I came back to StS after The Watcher was released since she felt fresh and like there were more options. I continued to play her exclusively for many hours. That's the kind of feel that I get with this game. There are five factions (colors, if you will) in Monster Train and you combine any two of them for each run. The sheer number of combinations keeps the game feeling fresh. Sure, I have my "favorite" cards for each faction, but they are still a bit more flexible than, say, StS. Different faction combinations give different value choices for heroes and spells, and that leads to continually interesting value choices as the hours go by.

If you are a fan of deck drafting games, I cannot recommend this one enough. I'm usually not one for creature combat, but the variety of mechanics among each faction, the satisfying and powerful combos you can develop, and the progression system (much more forgiving than StS) keep me coming back time after time. 10/10 would play again.

An excellent maximalist mashup of Slay The Spire with some Tower Defence and CCG Mechanics. Not as tight and elegantly designed as StS, but with a lot more variety in card design leads to a lot more varied and wild interactions and deck composition. Compulsive and mechanically satisfying, Monster Train embraces excess in a satisfying way, even if the whole package is wrapped up in a slightly odd aesthetic package of half remembered hearthstone knock offs. (The soundtrack, incidentally, slaps)

If you liked to Slay the Spire
You'll love to SAVE the Pyre