Posted on: January 20, 2025
Leonard03
Verified ownerGames: 337 Reviews: 9
An Excellent Addition to the Genre
First of all, I've got just under 40hrs in this game and really enjoyed it. Nice visuals, clean mechanics, good music, few bugs, and perhaps most importantly, a lot of variety. That being said, I do have one complaint; the difficulty scaling. Each time you beat the game you'll unlock the "Covenant level" above what you just played. There are a total of 25 levels, each adding some negative modifier to the run, eg. starting with dead cards in your deck, or extra enemy health. At early levels I found the difficulty scaled perfectly along with my skill. As I got better at playing the game, the game got tougher to play. However, this began to break down around when I cracked the double digits. During the course of a run, the difficulty of enemies increases, obviously. To keep up with them you have to upgrade your own cards, tune your deck, and play smart. That's great, until that doesn't keep you on pace with the enemies anymore. See, Monster Train has a lot of very powerful combo possibilities. The "Holdover" upgrade, for example, allows you to keep a spell card in your hand after you play it. Combine that with a good spell that's free? A run can become unstoppable. But if you don't find a Holdover? That "good" spell... isn't enough. You need the "broken" combos to succeed. Maybe you see where this is going. I found the game was becoming less about good tactics and more about what luck I got in the roguelike. Now, part of the fun of randomized runs is that you don't get exactly what you want, you have to make the best decision in the options available to you. But I felt like those decisions stopped being as impactful as simply whether X card showed up or not. You could argue that if I was better at the game, maybe it wouldn't matter. But in my mind, if I need to grind card combos or look up guides online, the fun is already gone. So I stopped at lvl 12. Even so, I got 40 hours out of the game until then. 5/7 - Not endlessly replayable, but a good amount of fun.
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