This is going to be a quick one, I promise. Maybe.

Almost exactly five years ago, Shiny Shoe came out of nowhere and released Monster Train, a refreshing and weird new spin on a Slay the Spire-style deck-builder. It’s base setup is pretty similar: you’ve got a deck of cards that represent creatures and spells, you have limited mana to spend per round, and when you run out of mana a round of combat ensues where the enemy attacks and then your party counter-attacks.

Monster Train brought a couple unique gimmicks to the table to make it more interesting, though, specifically:

  • Instead of one hero representing your deck, you get a “hero” card, but also have a whole variety of other creature cards to deploy, all with their own unique stats, triggers, effects, etc.

  • Instead of just having one “theme” to your deck, you pick two “clans” each run, and you build your deck from both of their card pools. Your “primary” clan is the one you get your solo hero card from, but when you get rewards you get to pop a booster pack from each of your clans instead of just the one deck. This means you’ve got 20 unique deck combos once you unlock everything, and for each unique combo you have 4 possible unique heroes you could have leading.

  • Instead of one head-to-head combat, the “train” is a stack of 4 rooms. The rooms each have occupancy limits (which can be expanded a variety of ways) and your creatures can be deployed to any room you have space for. Monsters enter at the bottom and any of them you don’t kill in one round go up to the next floor. If they make it to the fourth floor they attack your core, which is your “total” health for the run. This makes it feel sorta like a tower-defense game, where instead of just focusing on attack / block, you’re figuring out “ok, I can’t kill these guys this turn, but I’ll slap some debuffs on them in the first floor, then clean up on floors 2 & 3”.

  • Since you’ve got a bunch of creatures spread across three rooms, there are also cards and abilities that interact with that structure. So you have cards that let you move creatures up or down between rooms, or move creatures around in within a given room so certain creatures tank the hits. You can also apply these cards to enemies, to force them to go downstairs, or force a weaker enemy to the front of their stack.

This is all pretty neat! The different decks go way way way beyond just basic “FIRE DECK” / “POSION DECK” etc, there are clans that focus on thorns, clans that focus on eating effectively token creatures you spawn to snowball creatures to hulking monstrosities, and one clan that’s based on creatures that all have countdown timers until they die. It’s very well designed, and often times you end up building this bespoke Rube-Goldberg-esque automated monster meat-grinder machine.

So that’s Monster Train. I mention all this because all that core stuff is back in Monster Train 2, but also more. More everything. The core structure of the game is the same: you’re on a train (assaulting Heaven this time, because sure), you’re on a track, each stop has you choose between two selections of upgrades/shops/events followed by a combat encounter. Beat the encounter, move to the next stop. I assume you eventually Attack and Dethrone God, or whatever.

The difference is all the actual stuff. Five new clans with all-new cards, gimmicks, etc. I haven’t unlocked all the clans yet, but the starter two are “Devils” and “Dragons”. The Clan of Devils are built around movement-based buffs, so each time your characters move around in line they get a buff, and if they end on the “front” of the line at end of combat they get more buffs. The Dragons are based around fire, but not just a “normal” ticks-of-burn effect, it’s more like more stacks increase damage, so you’re finding ways to spread these debuff stacks around as early as possible so it persists through the floors.

Clans also now have overarching new mechanics, like the Dragons have a bunch of cards that can give you coins, but over on the side you also have your “dragon hoard” which is a special bonus set of reward tiers you can build up and cash out at any time for tons of gold, or special artifacts, or boss relics or whatever. There’s also a “Moon” focused clan that has a gimmick based on the current phase of the moon, which changes every turn. So like your hero might get a different buff every time the phase changes, or certain spells (they’re a very spell-heavy clan) might do more or less damage or have different effects given which phase you’re in.

But there’s even more stuff beyond that – Monster Train 2 brings two whole new classes of cards: rooms (which are buffs to individual rooms, naturally) and equipment (which are temporary buffs that get applied to creatures for a single encounter, and if the creature dies the equipment card pops off them and into your hand). So that’s neat too, I guess? They also gave certain creatures “abilities” on cooldowns, so instead of just having effects triggering on attack / counter-attack / end of combat / etc, you also get these bonus effects you can trigger whenever you want, so long as it’s off cooldown.

So “more” surely means “better”, right?!? Ehhhh. I’m sure somebody will enjoy this, and I definitely recommend it, but in my couple of runs so far it just feels overwhelming. Monster Train already had almost too many systems that interacted and proc’ed off each other constantly, often in difficult to parse ways. Monster Train 2 has so many that it’s frequently challenging to keep track of. So far I’m constantly losing track of my ability cooldowns and I forget to use them, or I get steamrolled by some turbo-buffed mob that has so many counter-attack abilities that they overflow on the screen and whoops I attacked the wrong guy at the wrong time so now everybody on the screen is even more powerful now? And I haven’t even unlocked two further kinds of modifiers, because now you can customize your train’s Pyre and can seemingly upgrade individual rooms too.

Personally, it’s a little too much. I’m probably going to play enough to unlock all the clans and maybe get a couple wins, but that’ll be it. I like it, I recommend it, but I don’t see this as a future forever-game for me, but it could have been.