Monster Train 2

The roguelike deckbuilder genre has a crowding problem. Ever since Slay the Spire proved that shuffling cards could be as tense as any boss fight, the storefronts have filled with imitators — most of them content to reskin the same escalating gauntlet. The original Monster Train stood out in 2020 by refusing to play it flat. It went vertical. It gave you a moving fortress to defend across three stacked floors, and it asked you to think about geography as much as arithmetic.

Monster Train 2, developed by Shiny Shoe and published by Big Fan Games, doesn’t reinvent that idea. It sharpens it. The premise is pure comic-book theology: Titans have stormed Heaven, and the survivors — angels and demons who spent the last game trying to kill each other — are now forced into an uneasy truce. You conscript clans, load them onto a newly forged train, and defend your Pyre as waves of enemies climb toward it floor by floor.

Positioned squarely at the strategy-hungry end of the market, this is not a game chasing the casual crowd. It sits in the same tier as Slay the Spire and Balatro — titles that treat replayability as a design pillar rather than a marketing bullet. Its Metacritic score of 87 reflects the point: this is a fanbase confirming the developer understood the assignment.

What separates this from the wave of also-rans is confidence. Shiny Shoe knows exactly who they’re building for, and they’ve built for depth over accessibility. The result is a game designed to respect your intelligence and punish your laziness. Newcomers will feel the incline. Veterans will feel right at home — then discover the ceiling moved up.

• Five New Clans: Each faction brings a distinct mechanical identity — not palette-swapped stat lines, but genuinely different ways to win. Learning one is a project. Mastering their pairings is a hobby.
• Room and Equipment Cards: The headline additions. Equipment bolts persistent buffs onto individual units, while Room cards let you modify the train itself. Both open combo lines the first game simply couldn’t reach.
• Covenant Outpost Hub: A between-runs base that carries story progression and unlocks, giving the meta-loop a narrative spine instead of a bare upgrade menu.
• Endless Depth Systems: Escalating Covenant difficulty ranks, globally ranked Daily Challenges with rotating mutators, and an Endless mode that keeps raising the stakes until you break.

The Gameplay Loop

The core rhythm is unchanged, and that’s a deliberate choice. Each turn hands you limited energy and a hand of units and spells. You draft, you place, you upgrade, and you decide which of your three floors gets your best defenders — because enemies march upward, and whatever survives the lower decks lands on your Pyre. Overcommit up top and the bottom collapses. Stack everything low and the stragglers still bleed you out. The vertical layout turns every placement into a small, satisfying dilemma.

Where the sequel earns its keep is in the synergy ceiling. The original was already a combo engine; this one adds two more axes to build around. Equipment cards let you invest in a single unit until it becomes a wrecking ball — a risky, glorious egg-in-one-basket play. Room cards buff the train’s structure, rewarding architectural thinking most deckbuilders never touch. When these systems click together — an equipped bruiser parked in a room that amplifies its clan’s mechanic — the payoff is the specific dopamine hit this genre exists to deliver. You don’t just win a fight. You watch a machine you designed detonate on schedule.

That depth comes at a cost, and it’s worth naming plainly: the learning curve is steep. Five new clans, two new card types, and cross-clan pairings mean the space of viable builds is enormous. For a returning player, that’s the entire appeal. For a newcomer, the early hours can feel like being handed a cockpit with too many switches. The game explains its parts competently, but it doesn’t hold your hand through the interactions — and the interactions are the whole point.

Decisions Under Pressure

What keeps the tension honest is the energy economy. You never have enough. Every turn is a negotiation between what you want to do and what you can afford, and the best runs come from sequencing plays so each one sets up the next. This is the tactical marrow of the game — small, sharp decisions repeated until they compound into a strategy. Get greedy and the Titans punish you. Play scared and you stall out against the difficulty scaling.

The Covenant ranks are the pressure valve that gives the game its legs. Clear a run and the next tier tightens the screws — tougher enemies, meaner modifiers, less margin. It’s a difficulty ladder that converts mastery into a measurable, climbable thing. Pair that with Daily Challenges — same seed, same mutators, global leaderboard — and you have a competitive hook that turns a solo strategy game into a daily water-cooler argument about the optimal line.

Where It Wobbles

No design this dense escapes balance friction. Some clan combinations are simply stronger than others, and the community has already flagged pairings that trivialize runs alongside ones that feel undertuned. In a game built on build variety, that matters — a dominant combo narrows the very space the game is selling you. It’s not a fatal flaw. Shiny Shoe has a track record of post-launch tuning, and the original evolved considerably after release. But at launch, expect the meta to have some obvious sharp edges.

The art direction is functional-handsome rather than jaw-dropping. Clans read clearly, cards are legible at a glance, and the vertical battlefield stays parseable even when the board gets busy — a genuine achievement given how much information the screen has to convey. This is a game where UI clarity is a survival mechanic, and the interface mostly rises to it. When you’re eyeballing three floors of stacked units, buffs, and incoming threats, readability isn’t a nicety; it’s the difference between a clean read and a fatal misclick.

Where it stumbles is density. In late runs, with equipment icons, room effects, and stacked status conditions layered across every floor, the screen can tip from “rich” to “cluttered.” Veterans will learn to filter the noise. Newcomers will occasionally miss the one detail that costs them the run. Performance, by contrast, should be a non-issue: this is a turn-based card game, not a physics sandbox, and a 2D game of this scope is light on hardware. Nothing stands between you and your next decision.

On Steam, this is the definitive way to play. Mouse-and-keyboard makes drag-and-drop placement precise, hovering for card details is a single motion, and the dense information layout was clearly designed with a monitor and a pointer in mind. The Daily Challenge leaderboards also feel most alive here, where the strategy community congregates.

On Nintendo Switch, the pitch is different and, for many, more compelling: this is a game that belongs in handheld form. The turn-based structure is perfect for the couch or the commute — pick up, play a floor, put it down. The tradeoff is control. Navigating dense menus and precise unit placement with a controller or the touchscreen is workable but never as fluid as a mouse, and the smaller screen intensifies the late-game clutter problem. If you want raw efficiency and competitive leaderboard play, go PC. If you want portability above all, the Switch version’s form factor is its own kind of killer feature.

Monster Train 2 does the hardest thing a sequel can do: it adds without bloating. The new clans, the Equipment and Room cards, the Covenant Outpost — none of it feels tacked on. It all feeds the same tight, vertical, combo-driven engine that made the original a standout, and it pushes the strategic ceiling meaningfully higher. The steep learning curve and some launch-day balance rough spots are real, and they’ll frustrate players wandering in cold. But for the audience this game is actually built for — people who see a deckbuilder and immediately start theorycrafting — that depth is the entire draw.

Shiny Shoe didn’t chase trends or dilute their vision to widen the net. They built a better version of a great game for the people who already knew it was great. That’s not the safe play. It’s the right one — with reservations worth weighing before you buy.