Monster Train 2 Review

Gideon’s Perspective

Warning: This Review Contains Gameplay Spoilers

Monster Train 2 is pretty much the same game as its predecessor, but bigger. For a deck-building game, that’s probably for the best. For the most part, it’s a direct improvement over the original, and its mechanics are more refined. On the other hand. Monster Train 2 also retains many of the same flaws as the first game and even exposes a new one that I may not have noticed in the first game, but was likely there.

You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!

Monster Train 2 still has you placing monsters on three levels of a train car to battle enemies while casting spells. It’s also still a game where finding what feels like a game-breaking combo is just par for the course. This time around, the game is just bigger. How much bigger? Well, spoiler alert, it’s practically got the first game packed inside itself.

To be clear, Monster Train and Monster Train 2 both feature 5 extremely unique factions that each have their own leaders, cards, and artifacts. At the start of each run, you choose two of these factions to combo together, leading to all kinds of wild shenanigans. In Monster Train 2, however, it actually takes the first game’s 5 factions wholesale and includes them alongside the 5 new ones, giving you 10 total factions to mix and match.

Not many sequels manage to do something like that. If you haven’t played the first game, it’s difficult to justify purchasing the first Monster Train at all because you end up getting its most meaningful content in Monster Train 2. I had to pick my jaw up off the floor when I progressed far enough to unlock the original 5 because I was so surprised.

It’s both a testament to how much content the game has and how little it actually changed that they slide in so smoothly. In some ways, it makes Monster Train 2 feel like a big add-on for the first game. But in this case, I don’t think that’s a negative the way it would be with other genres.

Gideon’s Bias	Monster Train 2 Information
Review Copy Used: No	Publisher: Big Fan Games
Hours Played: 20+	Type: Full Game
Reviewed On: Xbox Series X	Platforms: PC, Xbox Series, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch
Fan of Genre: Yes	Genre: Rogue-lite Deck Builder
Mode Played: Variety	Price: $24.99

Angels, Dragons, and Mushrooms, Oh My!

Monster Train 2s biggest strength is the sheer variety of combos its factions offer. Each faction has 2 leaders and a whole host of cards to unlock. Since you pick a primary and sub faction at the start of each run, you have numerous ways to break the game, and breaking the game is both expected and encouraged. That was one of the strengths of the first game, and it stands strong in the sequel. You just casually find combos that feel like extremely rare game breakers, and it turns out to be a perfectly normal combo once you dial up the ascending difficulty.

The five new factions give you an array of cool tricks to play with. A faction of angels gives you the ability to maneuver units around your train and bonuses for doing so. A faction of dragon’s spray foes with pyre gel that increases the damage they take while accumulating a hoard of eggs to be looted after battle.

A mad scientist concocts powerful mutagens, while a mushroom army stacks grunts on the front line that eventually powers up to absurdly high attack numbers. Another faction of Moon People receives various powers during different cycles of the moon, then, of course, you have the five factions from the first game to mix with them all.

The amount of card and combo potential is staggering. Furthermore, Monster Train’s mini tower defense concept of protecting three floors of a train still feels delightfully fresh in the face of thousands of games that copy Slay the Spires’ exact formula. Monster Train 2 still stands on the laurels of its own excellent spin on that design.

Another of the games’ highlights is the agency you have in sculpting your deck and overall strategy. In addition to picking new cards after a battle, you also pick one of two routes for the train to follow. Along each route are shops, artifacts, equipment and events, all of which have even more decisions for you to make.

In particular, I really loved the ability to modify your unit and spells with new keywords or stats and the ability to merge two equipment cards into one. You can come up with all kinds of ridiculous combos that bounce off one another. Since you combine 2 of 10 factions together, those potential combos can feel infinite in their variety, and player choice sits at the center of it all.

While the multiplayer mode from the first game is noticeably missing, Monster Train 2 offers an interesting variety of modes. You have standard runs, and those can, of course, be augmented by ascending difficulty modifiers known as Covenant ranks, but that’s far from all of it.

One of the complaints I had about the original Monster Train is that runs felt too short. The same is also true in Monster Train 2. But now you have the option of playing endlessly after a successful run to see just how far you can get. That solves one really big hang up I had with the original.

There are also dimensional challenges to take part in, as well as daily challenges. Finally, you can also modify a run with a whole bunch of mutators for some extra replay value. Monster Train 2 is a really big game packed with more content than I was realistically expecting. It doesn’t do much to iterate on its predecessor, but instead simply refines its formula and then goes really, really big with it.

I’ve been known to be critical of sequels that feel like more of the same so I may come off as hypocritical here, but being more of the same but bigger and better is likely the best thing Monster Train 2 could have done.

Context is everything, and when it comes to a card-based deck building game, reinventing the wheel is likely to go over poorly. Especially when Monster Train already innovated on the deck builder concept to begin with.

Kink in the Rails

Despite being an overall improvement over the first game, Monster Train 2 still retains a couple of its flaws. The first being a small pool of random events, they repeat constantly.

The second being a somewhat limited enemy variety, or least a variety that has a limited impact on my decision space. If I think back to Slay the Spire, I can tell you what every enemy did, because it mattered, and I haven’t played it in ages.

I played Monster Train 2 this very morning, and I couldn’t name an enemy or what they did if I tried, because it largely didn’t matter. That’s not to say it never matters, just not enough to imprint them into my memory. To me they are largely just bags of hit-points that deal damage, and this leads into a new complaint. Well, calling it new isn’t fair, Monster Train 1 likely has this same issue, and I just might not have noticed back then, for whatever reason.

That complaint is, that sometimes my runs can feel on rails, no pun intended. Around half way through a run, I’m still making meaningful choices about how to build my strategy, but not how I play with it. I’m placing down the exact same monsters, in the exact same order as before. I’m equipping them with the exact same gear cards, casting the spells in the same order and overall, piloting my deck the exact same way through the whole run, because it works.

Sure a new card might make a slight tweak to what I’m doing, but it doesn’t change it. Once I’ve decided on a build, which I do roughly within 3 battles, my deck is more or less on auto pilot. I’ve never felt incentive to adapt or change it based on the enemies I encounter. I’ve either secured enough damage to win the entire run, or I didn’t.

That can make Monster Train 2 feel repetitive despite its massive amount of content and combo synergy simply because I spend half the run feeling like my deck is playing itself. I’m just pushing the buttons that allow it to do so.

There is a slight caveat here, I’m not SUPER high up the covenant ranks yet. So maybe that changes at some point. But I’m often reminded about one of the many reasons I quit Magic the Gathering. One of which, is that high level matches felt like they were decided during deck building, as many decks just piloted themselves. That’s less interesting to me than being required to adapt your strategy in the face of various foes or challenges.

The thing is, I don’t think that’s entirely avoidable late into a run of a deck building game. But in Monster Train 2, it happens really fast, and it has to. If you are more than 3 battles in and you haven’t figured out a focus, you’ve already lost. You just don’t know it yet.

It’s just one of those things where I can’t decide how much it’s impacting my enjoyment, because I really do like the game. but it’s an annoying realization that scratches at the walls of my brain every time I play

Verdict

Monster Train 2 is a deck building game that is packed full of content, at least in part by including half of the content from the first game. Beyond that, it’s a better polished and more refined version of Monster Train. While it still features a few of the first games flaws, it’s pretty much an ideal sequel for this genre of game.

It’s presents you with meaningful choices at every turn, offers an endless mode to really test the mettle of your builds and continues to iterate on it’s own evolution of the genre that Slay the Spire spawned. I’m a little bothered by how much my decks tend to pilot themselves, but that just may be the nature of the beast, and may even be a good thing depending on your perspective.

What I do know, is that for a relatively inexpensive price, you could get an absurd number of gameplay hours out of Monster Train 2 and have a lot of fun doing it.