Monster Train on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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Monster Train is a strategic roguelike deck building game with a twist. Set on a train to hell, you’ll use tactical decision making to defend multiple vertical battlegrounds. With real time competitive multiplayer and endless replayability, Monster Train is always on time.
Monster Train is a card battler, rogue-lite and card game game
developed by Shiny Shoe
and published by Good Shepherd Entertainment.
Released on May 21st 2020 is available only on Windows
in 6 languages: English, French, German, Portuguese - Brazil, Russian and Simplified Chinese.
It has received 21,563 reviews of which 20,704 were positive and 859 were negative resulting in an impressive rating of 9.4 out of 10. 😍
The game is currently priced at 7.35€ on Steam with a 70% discount, but you can find it for 2.92€ on Instant Gaming.
The Steam community has classified Monster Train into these genres:
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS *: Windows 7
- Processor: Core i3
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: IGP or better
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 2 GB available space
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
When Slay the Spire is about the meticulous, finely granular gameplay pattern of slowly building your deck by compromising between slightly better-statted cards for deck-size (and keeping an eye for insane card draws), Monster Train is about the explosive, broken combo of card games. Were MTG Blue-White control is StS, then MT is amalgamation of Jund deck: it's about all the explosive turns, the big dudes, and the creative interlinks that glue the whole deck together. MT skips the slow-burn of deckbuilding game by offering various cards which have absurd effects/stats for their mana costs, and since the stage is inspired from Dante's Inferno's 9 rings of hell, each ring gives you progressively more rewards as you complete each ring. At first and second ring, you may just remove a card or add a couple upgrades to a few core pieces, but by the final 8th ring, you can upgrade 3 cards, duplicate your best-upgraded-rarest card, remove multiple junks, buy 3+ relics, and so on. It is a nice stage progression that doesn't overwhelm you at the start of the run, but once you get the feel and direction of your deck from the card and relic drops each ring, you'll find yourself hammering and molding the deck to perfection as you go. Admittedly, the Covenant levels (StS Ascension difficulty level) strictly limits the archetype variety on max difficulty, so RNG become more pronounced there than StS. But don't let that discourage you the best part the game has to offer: the daily challenge. Even better: community-created challenge. People added rules and restrictions that, while breaking the base difficulty, enhances the fun part of the game. I even encourage you to delve deep this mode just to understand the secret sauce of deckbuilding before tackling high Covenants.
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This is one of those games where you'll either play 20 hours of it and never think about it again or you'll play hundreds of hours and it will never leave your recently played queue. It is endlessly replayable. Every time you load up a game it feels different and you will have to adapt your deck building strategy on the fly. It is a text book example of not judging a book by it's cover because there is a depth of gameplay hiding behind its simple facade that is breathtaking.
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Monster Train is a deck-building game. It's following in the footsteps of other great games like Slay the Spire. As a result, I will be comparing this game to Slay the Spire a lot. In Monster Train, you defend a train full of (you guessed it) monsters. You fight a series of battles, with each battle involving a bunch of minor enemies followed by a major (boss) enemy. In-between battles you do some deck construction using various stations. One run takes about 60 to 90 minutes. I've gotten 85 hours of fun out of this game. THE GOOD: - Monster Train is a really fun card battler. - The train level mechanic, where you have 4 different levels in your train, adds a lot of strategic depth and novelty. - You can always refuse a new card or artifact, something I always wished I could do in Slay the Spire—which would force me to take cards I didn't want and then make it really hard to get rid of them. - It's also easier to remove cards you don't want, often allowing you to craft the deck you want by the endgame. - The game lets you know who the major bosses are at the very start of the run. This allows you to build your deck accordingly. - Great variety of enemies, cards, and special abilities. - Great learning curve, as new concepts are gradually introduced so you don't have to drink from a firehose of knowledge. - Nice graphics and music. THE BAD: - There is no real story to the game. There's kind of the veneer of a story, but it doesn't really explain why you need to do multiple runs. - Even with the better control over your deck than other games in the genre, you are still at the mercy of the random number generator. It can be frustrating to lose because you never found the cards you needed, or because of a terrible draw for an otherwise great deck. - The game developers claim this game is a roguelike, but it's not really. You play to unlock new features, which is a good tutorial mechanic, but to be a roguelike the game should require you to learn by failing. I won on my second attempt. THE UGLY: - In this game the protagonists are the demons of Hell, and you actually fight against Heavenly angels. This doesn't bother me, but you might find it offensive. - When using a mouse and dragging a card to play it, if you linger the game can automatically scroll up to a level above. This is a great way to ruin your battle by playing the card on the wrong level! - The game enables you to ramp up the difficulty with a feature called the Covenant. This is ostensibly a good thing that gives the game some extra life and challenge. Unfortunately, in trying to find a variety of ways to increase the difficulty the game designer has mainly made the game more annoying. They add lots of junk cards to your deck and make it harder to remove those cards. Hence, rather than ending with a bang, the game kind of fizzled out with a whimper as I got increasingly frustrated and quit.
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Monster Train Monster Train is roguelike deck building game in which you are on a train that is heading towards hell. Gameplay Is Monster Train just another roguelike deck building game? Not really. The twist of Monster Train is somewhat unique since you have a total of three lanes that you are defending from incoming enemies. Usually, without special modifier or boss abilities, the enemies will start on the first floor and will, if you don’t defeat them, continue going up until they reach your pyre. You lose when your pyre hits zero health points, so you better make sure to defend it with everything you have. There are different factions that each come with a unique playstyle, their own units and champions as well as spells and you have to mix those well since you usually combine two factions with each other which gives the game more depth and a bunch of combo potential. There is a total of three big and a handful of smaller bosses that you need to defeat to win. Personal Note Now, I’m probably not the only one that instantly thought of other roguelike card games that seem to be released in endless waves ever since Slay the Spire popularized this genre and you are probably right to think of games like Slay the Spire, Inscryption, Banners of Ruin or Across the Obelisk since they all have something in common: Roguelike and roguelite games mix well with deck building & card games and that applies to Monster Train as well. The game was recommended to me by a friend and during the last Steam summer sale I finally pulled the trigger & bought it and it hooked me instantly. The art-style, the music, the somewhat unique gameplay and the fact that you can make battles harder for more resources from the get go is just an overall plus in my book. Something else that is positive is that the text of abilities is clear to read and super easy to understand which means that people that are new to roguelike card games will have a good time from the very beginning while people that have been playing similar games might instantly cook up great combinations. After every battle you can decide on which things to go for. For example, on the left lane, there might be a merchant that lets you upgrades spells, a random event field and you get a unit for your main faction and on the right lane, there is a merchant that lets you upgrade units, a merchant that offers artifacts and a field that lets you choose a unit from your supporting faction. After every bigger boss fight, you can choose between some upgrades for your pyre and you get to upgrade your champion as well. There’s something negative that I want mention: Some buffs and debuffs are just a bit unfair to deal with. If the randomness is on your side, you might build up insanely good combinations that can fall flat almost instantly in certain encounters. The sab and frostbite effects are just very strong and can be hard to deal with at times; although it’s a very good thing when your enemies have endless stacks of frostbite on them – it goes both ways obviously. The soundtrack fits to the rest of the game and the art style just goes well with all the monsters and champions of the game. There is a multiplayer mode called “Hell Rush” but I haven’t tried it out so I’m not sure how good or how much fun it is. I usually just go for normal or daily challenge runs; the latter is sort of multiplayer but not really at the same time. Monster Train also offers community challenges that you can create yourself and play challenges that other players created. There are also mods for Monster Train but I haven’t tried any of them since it’s probably best to play the base game for a while before messing around with mods. Rating Pros [*] Great art style and aesthetics [*] Good soundtrack [*] Factions feel unique and change up the gameplay [*] Interesting idea for some cards and factions [*] Daily challenges [*] Progression system [*] Mod support Cons [*] Some runs seem unwinnable at times [*] Some buffs and debuffs are annoying to deal with Conclusion Would I recommend buying Monster Train ? Absolutely! The game is fun and I just like it a lot. I believe that newbies and veterans of the roguelike / roguelite & deck building genre will enjoy playing this game a bunch. The daily challenges as well as the progression system itself keeps me going and despite sometimes feeling that runs are super hard to win – it’s a good game which has quite a bit of replayability which is very important for such games. The price tag of 24,50€ might seem a bit high but if I knew how much I like the game, I would have bought it without a discount but I understand if you think that the price might be a bit high for you personally. You can always wait until Monster Train goes on sale and give it a shot then. 8.5 / 10 “ Hell, our home Frozen when heaven extinguished the pyres. But one spark, is enough to reignite a revolution. ” – The Narrator If you found this review helpful, feel free to visit my [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38665896/]curator page.
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I don't like how the difficulty is leveled. In short, your run seems to be going well until you suddenly hit a wall of difficulty: Game over. It's not progressive, you don't feel the difficulty increasing little by little. You go through normal fights very easily, and suddenly the boss appears and atomizes you. So nice game but a bit frustrating because the defeats are very sudden.
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Last Updates| Steam data | 07 April 2025 12:12 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 09 April 2025 22:33 |
| Steam price | 15 April 2025 04:27 |
| Steam reviews | 13 April 2025 05:55 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Monster Train, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Monster Train
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Monster Train concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Monster Train compatibility
Online players
998
Developer
Shiny Shoe
Publisher
Good Shepherd Entertainment
Release
21 May 2020
Platforms
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