Monster Train was one of my favorite Slay the Spire-like takes in the roguelike deck builder genre. The concept, awesome visuals, and addictive gameplay meant that I spent almost as many hours on as I did on Slay the Spire. When a sequel was announced, I was incredibly excited. How did they improve upon the original without losing the core gameplay that made everything so fun? Thankfully, the answer is straightforward: It's more polished, it has more content, and it's everything that made Monster Train fun.

For those who've never played Monster Train before, Monster Train 2 follows a similar concept, so it's a hybrid of tower defense and a Slay the Spire-style deck builder. The battlefield is a train that's comprised of a top, middle and bottom layer. For every turn, you draw monsters and spells from your deck, which you can play in one of those three layers. Once you've taken your action, a combat phase begins, where enemy units enter from the bottom layer and automatically have one round of combat with every unit. Should an enemy survive, they'll move up to the middle layer and then the top layer. At the top is your train's pyre, and when an enemy reaches it, they can damage it. If the pyre takes too much damage, you lose the run.

It's a simple concept on paper, but it's incredibly engaging. At the start of every run, you select from one of five different factions, each with its own play style. The Banished are fallen angels who focus on powering up and moving around the battlefield with their wings. The Pyreborn are fire-based demonic dragons who excel at inflicting burning debuffs to enemies. There's a race of fae-like beings who are controlled by the moon, lurking mushroom monsters, and my favorite is the Lazarus League, who's comprised of mad scientists and their creations.

You choose a primary clan and a secondary clan for each run. You get cards and artifacts from both clans you choose, but the primary clan also lets you pick a champion, who is a powerful unit who will always be drawn from your hand on your first turn and can be customized in various ways. Each clan also has more than one champion with their own gimmicks. The Pyreborn has a male dragon who excels at inflicting bad stats effects and dealing straightforward damage or a female dragon who can power up by spamming disposable minions. Alternatively, she could choose to protect a vulnerable egg, and if the egg survives the fight, you receive huge rewards.

Each clan is fun to play, and I can't say that there was one that didn't work. It's clear the developers learned a lot from the dynamics of the first game, so the different characters feel more dynamic and fun. The Pyreborn and Hellhorned sound very similar on the surface, but they have interesting gimmicks. Rather than just dealing damage, Pyreborn are built around increasing the damage to enemies, so you can stack nasty damage onto single foes.

New to Monster Train 2 is the deployment phase. This phase, which occurs before combat starts, provides a handful of monster cards and the ability to position them safely on one of the layers of your tank before fighting begins. This makes creating distinct builds far less of a gamble than it was in the original game. You can comfortably set up your defenses and then spend the successive turns focusing on countering enemies and powering up, rather than trying to begin basic builds.

I really like this change. In the original Monster Train, you often had to prioritize draws over anything else at higher difficulty levels because getting out a proper team was much more essential than anything else. It drained the fun of individual choice. In Monster Train 2, you're able to start from a position of power, so enemies can also start out stronger. It rewards players for using all three layers of the tank and using units that usually need time to build up.

Monster Train 2 seems to have realized that one of the more common tactics in the first game was building up one or two units and having them dominate the field. There's a lot more in place to reward that style. New to the game are room and equipment cards. Room cards modify the level of the train you're on and can yield specialized benefits ranging from additional damage to causing the entire floor to explode in every round. Equipment cards can be equipped on a specific unit to grant a powerful boon, such as damage increases, new skills, and more. You can massively power up individual units, turning almost anything your party into an ace unit.

In addition, there are now active abilities baked into specific characters or equipment. These abilities function on a cooldown system but can be activated when the unit is deployed on the field. Each unit with an active ability has something interesting. One might be able to fly around the battlefield, so they can freely move up and down the floors of the train. Another can cast a powerful healing spell, force an enemy to move, or create a potion to power up a specific ally. These basically function as free cards that can be deployed as needed.

The same also goes for the new upgrades to the pyre. In the original game, your pyre was just a pyre. It damaged enemies who attacked it, and if it died, it was game over. In Monster Train 2, you can equip different pyre hearts. Each heart changes the total HP and damage of your pyre, but in turn, it offers benefits, such as allowing a once-a-stage full heal, or giving you a free bonus draw during each turn as long as you use cards from both primary and secondary clans. This feature is nice and allows you to further customize characters.

All of this leads to some incredibly fun different play styles. For the Lazarus League, you can focus on creating one absurdly powerful creature and use the rest of your team to power it up.

To make up for all these advantages, enemies do seem to hit harder. The average enemy in Train 2 is bulkier and more powerful than those in Train 1. It's not enough to be unfair on the lower difficulty modes, but it's enough that I really had to consider the best way to handle foes. Even when I had a hyper-optimized powerful unit with tons of damage at the front of the line, enemies had enough bulk and defensive options to survive anything that I threw at them, so having multiple floors of defenses felt like a necessity.

There's a lot of content in the game. Monster Train 2 has an independent story that gradually unlocks as you complete challenges and objectives. Not only does the narrative unlock new content, such as specialized challenge runs where you must complete missions with certain handicaps, but it also provides insight into the (frequently comedic) story of various characters and clans that populate the world. It doesn't get in the way of enjoying the game, but it adds a nice sense of metaprogression that encourages players to try tougher challenges. It's easy to imagine the game lasting hundreds of hours, especially if you want to take on the real challenge modes that unlock as you progress and win.

Monster Train 2 is a nice visual upgrade from the first game. While it hasn't changed that much, all of the art is notably higher quality. The character models, artwork and environments are all a nice glow-up that leaves it recognizable but better than before. The soundtrack is also top-notch, containing a lot of incredibly good tunes (both new and old) that make the act of playing cards feel a lot more epic than it is.

Monster Train 2 is pretty much everything a sequel should be: bigger, better, more refined, and more fun to play. Some of the mechanical changes are more akin to sideways upgrades, but even then, I preferred the new way once I got used to it. There's so much genuine enjoyment to be had with the game that I could barely put it down and stop playing. If I didn't have other titles to move on to, I would probably still be playing Monster Train 2. Fans of the original or fans of roguelike deck-builders will find a lot to love, and it's easily a must-play for fans of the genre.

Score: 9.0/10