Monster Train
PC
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery – in which case Slay The Spire’s makers must have blushed the deepest crimson at Monster Train. This is not the first game to hitch itself to Mega Crit’s deck-building Roguelike wagon, but it is comfortably the most successful. At its best, it feels not so much like a copycat as a spiritual sequel.
Many Spire ideas come over wholesale, albeit with tweaks to the vocabulary: Exhaust becomes Consume, Poison is rebadged as Frostbite, and so on. But for every design note Monster Train borrows, it adds several more, spread across the card pools of its five classes, styled as Clans. Synergies abound, many of them thrillingly absurd. STS is a work of austere purity; Monster Train is one of ravenous excess, a game that gives you the tools to break the game in half, and revels in it.
Despite the obvious inspiration, there is much that Monster Train can call its own. The titular train is on a voyage into the depths of hell, and is split across four floors. The topmost contains your Pyre, the train’s health pool, which must be protected by units you place, and spells you cast, on the floors below. Enemies enter on the ground floor, and those that survive a turn of combat ascend to the next level.
In a crucial deviation from the Spire template, enemies attack first. It proves again how the smallest design decisions can often have the biggest impact, meaning you start every turn not by asking whether you can win this turn, but ensuring you can survive it. The positioning of your units, both around the train and on each individual level, is key.
Your overall strategy is built around your Champion, a zero-cost card available from the outset that’s always in your starting hand and can be upgraded as you progress. The units you acquire along the way can also be powered up at stores: each card has two upgrade slots, and the effects can be transformative, giving weedy cards a stat boost, or buffing a heavy hitter’s attack power even further.
Monster Train, like Slay The Spire, blends CCG and Roguelike. Yet it also borrows from the RTS the immense satisfaction of entering the final stage of a fight with your armies laid out just so: the wonderful moment you realise the battle is won and just sit back to watch it play out. At times, those component parts get in each other’s way – card-draw RNG often denies you your planned setup, and on higher difficulties if you don’t get off to a good start you might as well pack it in. But this is a smart, savvy evolution of the Spire formula, one you suspect Mega Crit, flattery be damned, would have been happy to put its name to.