Alright imagine yourself on a train, a train with monsters, no not the type that takes off their shoes and puts them on a seat where someone eventually is going to sit, I mean real monsters. Now imagine that in a surprisingly fun deck type game, where you battle on 3 different platforms using your monsters, strengthening them with all sorts of types. That ladies and gentlemen of the Hive community, is Monster Train.
Monster train is a fun game which seems to be a mixture of slay the spire, Magic the gathering with maybe a little bit of Hearthstone’s flavor. While you have to play with your monsters against other monsters, and your cards are there rather to shift the battle in your favor like slay the spire, you’re actually playing with a mixture of 2 monster clans. Each monster clan is represented with a color and have some unique cards with abilities specific to said monster clan. By combining 2 of them you have the ability to create some unique combinations to play the game in a way that you want too, hence the comparison to Magic the Gathering.
The game starts surprisingly light, giving every time you discover a new combo an amazing feeling like you’ve “broken” the game. Because of this you easily are sucked in 10 hours in the game not even realizing you were playing this long.
After every battle the train track splits in 2, where you choose which track you want to take. The track you choose will let you do something additional to you deck depending on the track you choose: upgrades, duplicating cards, or purging some of your less interesting cards are just a few of the many options. This option is what makes the replay value of the game so great. Even when you choose the same monster clans you can opt for different tracks. Changing the experience doing so.
The game isn’t perfect (yet). Sometimes the lack of explanation on certain cards leaves you wondering what you can actually do with them. But in theory these sort of things are easily fixed with an update.
If you like indie games, and or card games I hope you take the moment to check on Monster train in the Steam store.
