It is a pretty by the book action rpg roguelike with progression mechanics tied to a VN like friend system. If that's too many terms - Think a simpler Hades with a friendship meter rather than extensive dialogue. For the most part gameplay is well done but doesn't try new things save a few quirky items- Controls are good, combat is fairly smooth, with parry and dodge mechanics and a fairly fast pace. Perfects require a bit of rhythm for some bonus damage and bosses has some simple patterns to learn to mastery/cheese. The issue is that almost all of its "character" or unique aspects, I didn't really care for. I didn't like the blocky 3d art style. I didn't care for the story or the piecemeal way it's told. The progression system is slow and it didn't make me want to try and beat it on harder difficulties (I finished at 25% completion with 15 runs, so maybe 10hrs? 40hr for completion sounds about right). I tried the harder settings for a bit and it also made the combat way more hit and run, in an unfun kind of way. The gift guesswork matchup was better than the typical give a thousand swords to the sword lover, but like the other progression too slow for me. Much of this is obviously subjective, but still can't think of recommending it to someone unless they really like the genre already.
Though many reviews are calling it such, this is NOT intended to be a metroidvania. While the map is big and exploration heavy, there are plenty of warp points and none of it is dependent on what equips you have. While there are some secrets and backtracking, almost all of them are for chests that (kinda spoilers) you are incentivized not to go after. It does play like one of the earlier Castlevania games otherwise. TLDR - kinda slow 2d side stroller with weak controls and strong focus on items and synergies. Overall, this was a decent game (3.5*) but not one I would recommend. The main appeal are its many weapons, items and equips. You should be constantly finding synergies and ways to cheese encounters. For example, using thunder or ice in water damages everything in the water, including you. But if you are immune to that kind of damage... Controls are awkward and even after beating the game I still would not feel comfortable trying to move, roll, jump, and attack together. I would concentrate on two and "switch styles" to deal with attacks. Melee is supposed to be kinda weak as it doesn't consume resources, but after you get reliable ways to get mp or returning ammunition, you rarely want to use it. It is quite slow, especially with block being so useful and later on you basically want to recharge after each kill. You can go much faster and skip a lot but first time through you often want to go carefully and thoroughly. Enemies do a lot of DOT to basically waste your resources, ie using an antidote every time you are poisoned as the DOT can be over half the damage. Bosses are both the fun and annoying bits as they often have attacks that basically 1hko you in the harder difficulties if you're caught. It kinda has to be that way as later on you can do the Skyrim style of healing by eating a bunch in pause menu every time you are hit. Jumps are not great and the platforming parts are thankfully fairly short but unfortunately plentiful.
I think it's well known enough that this is a very good game. If you didn't know and some reason started with my review, go read some others first or just buy it and play it. Anyhow, despite liking this game a lot and completing everything, I'm going to rant about quite a few minor quibbles I've had with it. I have died with full health and on the final (non bonus) level not due to any enemy but... fire. I did not realize you had to repeatedly roll to remove it until I had beaten the final boss! Not being able to see the names of the guns/items on the ground is annoying. Learning what guns do what is fine*. Having to memorize their shapes is not. *Okay, always wanting to have a wiki on the side to see how much dps each gun does is kinda annoying. The bullet past boss is... bad. They make you relearn the game to play as him. Then make you unlearn it at the final battle by removing several core features. To make it worse, it's one of the longest past bosses to beat. The elevator and bounty quests are not great. You have to set aside runs just to deal with them and grind a lot. I had more than half of the bounty quests leftover when I completed everything else. If not for rainbow runs, I wouldn't have bothered with the elevator.
Very light hearted and silly themes betray a decently strategic and layered competitive board game. You also have to be in the right mindset as seeing your perfect piece get taken or having your board be cut off or stranded can be quite frustrating. Also as the last single player stage shows (slight spoiler) if your opponents team up against you, it can be VERY difficult. I had to lower the difficulty (which requires resetting the entire chapter for some reason) just for that last battle. Every other chapter I was able to handle the hardest difficulty without too much of a struggle. The AI is decent but doesn't do any long term strategizing and has to get lucky. Which it very well can, but only so often.
You can see where it wants to go (or believe it should have gone) in many aspects but just falls flat as much as it succeeds. The overall gameplay and UI is fine. Not great but enjoyable/functional enough. There's a decent strategic element for deck building, but not so much for the actual battles besides what to mulligan (to be fair, a lot of tcgs have this issue). It's interesting to find ways to beat things while "underleveled", but it just makes it harder to grind when you need to. And you will almost certainly need to. Decent 3d graphics (for its kind) and "free" roaming but probably been better to just be sprite and grid or node based. There's no point for the 3d, and the limited timing puzzles just aren't worth the annoyance and time waste from the movement. Especially in the tavern. Having to run or fight the boss right after you complete a level might seem exciting. But when you want to challenge it or even just check its stats, you'll need to go through a full level first. There's a reason why save points are located right infront of a boss room. You can absolutely cheese the bosses with the right creatures and equips but then have to deal with much harder normal enemies as there's no way to go back. Plus you can't change decks to fight the boss. You have to use the last deck you just used.
The story is that you must light the Pyre while traveling through the layers of Hell while fighting off angels. So why Monster Train? Not a minus star complaint or anything, but just wanted to point out that the name is really odd. Sure, the train is a major piece of the plot and you ride it through the levels but... it's still an odd image compared to the other parts. The game is pretty standard medivalish fantasy, not steampunk or industrial. And what kind of train has 4 levels/floors? And has the engine on the TOP? At least if it was different cars/sections and they advanced horizontally it'll fit that image better. Or maybe make it a pun and have you train the monsters. As for the game itself- It's a fun deckbuilding roguelite similar to STS and such. And while somewhat easy, still strategic with lots of decisions on what to get and upgrade. It is a lot shorter than STS with a run only lasting 9 battles, and considerably fewer cards/artifacts; there are still a decent variety of builds along with the mixing of clans for different ways to play. A small number of artifacts/events/combos though are so incredibly impactful that if you get them at the right time, the rest of your choices will revolve around it.
This is a pretty good game for a "first time" player that has some strategic know how. Still decently enjoyable even to veterans that don't mind the easy difficulty. It is very simply to see how everything works and fairly well polished with only a few bugs such as text cutting off on a few powers and some minor glitches. The fact that it is quite easy and short - especially for the rogue-lite genre, will be a bonus even. Most people will probably win over half of their games. The two major issues are that A) it is often the best strategy to make one of your pieces overpowered and mostly ignore the other two, besides as meatshields. B) one of the three pieces, the "mage", is almost always going to be left behind as it almost always has to wait for enemies to come to it, which is slower. more dangerous and later on, can get outranged.
And as a pegged legged thief at that. I was going to say its methodical often reactionary gameplay is closer to Souls, but those games generally had speed with its momentum. Here, you move like a snail, compounded with the sneaking they encourage you to do. Both as a mechanic and that attacking a group is not a good idea. Your most useful attack for a good deal of the game is.... throwing a pot as with that you at least have some control and it deals decent damage compared to your toothpick. Plus you don't have to wait forever for them to attack. I am also not a fan of how it limits your vision. I understand its very inline with the sneaking, but its just not good being surprised by things right next to you. I've ran into traps when moving forward. And not like hidden traps, but things that are bigger than my avatar on screen when they are revealed. You definitely can get used to the controls. but it never feels great and fighting groups remains tricky but something you keep needing to do.
It's one thing to die by a challenging battle or being unprepared. It's another to starve to death when you didn't even realize hunger was a thing. It's not just a tutorial issue. Simply having better UI and tooltips could streamline so much of the initial confusion. This is NOT such a complex game that you should be looking through video guides and outside tutorials, but frankly you should even at the risk of ruining the discover part as the "learning" phase is not so much harsh as just annoying.
TLDR - Strategy-wise like Slay the Spire but requires more meta-knowledge of the game and strategies. Like a lot of roguelikes, a lot of the early part is discovering new things. Then pain. And this game tends to revel in it. For example, it has a lot of sublevels that are literally labeled as ? when you first see them. And may very well kill you if you aren't ready. This isn't just being careful; you'll need to know what you need to do almost immediately. This is actively triggering traps to learn what they are, and in later lives, using them to get easy arrows and spikes. Though you can progress mostly just stumbling through and learning, to actually win without absurd luck, you'll need to have some strats in mind and depending on what RNG items you get, focus on them from pretty early. This is less intuitive and involves more meta-knowledge than Slay the Spire, as rather than just RNG and synergies, two of the base gameplay concepts are re-rolling items and sacrificing some stats to increase another. You can't exactly do either very well without knowing what items you can get, or what your stats should be for the strategy you want. This is not including the fact like a third of the items need to be unlocked through achievements. The bosses especially are not something you are likely to be ready for your first time reaching there, either needing specific strategies or much higher stats than everything else. To illustrate To beat the basic mode I took about 6 hours with ~20 runs. From a glance at howlongtobeat, this is on the short end. To beat the next highest difficulty, I took 2 hours with 3 runs. Note I choose a slow (but more reliable) strat.
