Monster Train

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.

Surprisingly great game! Addictive and rewarding. Each run seems to play differently enough to keep interest engaged.

I've played Slay the Spire before and this game has a lot in common, but in many aspects is unique and great. So far couple hours in but I already see huge replayability potential because you can mix 2 out of 5 factions everytime you start a new run, so there are a lot of combinations. New artifacts and cards get unlocked after each run, you can even unlock new champions (very strong monsters in each faction around which you build your deck). What I also love about this game is the fact that everytime I "hope" something would be in the game - it already is: - convenient way to check your deck mid-battle? check! - summary of damage done each turn so you don't have to calculate it yourself? - check! - a lot of unlockables after each run? - check! - a way to speed up combat? - check! - challenging but rewarding way to increase difficulty from run to run? - check! I understand some people may think this is some kind of cheap mobile game made only to make you pay real money to even play it, maybe because of it's graphic, but it's absolutely not true. Gameplay is awesome, engaging, fair and this game has zero pay2win aspects. Everything is unlockable for just playing the game. Must try!

Easy to play but very hard to win. Won't say easy to learn though. There is a lot to know here.

A great roguelike deckbuilder. Highly recommend.