Monster Train review - "Who knew riding a train to hell could be so much fun?"

Personally, I have never been the biggest roguelike fan. The idea of grinding out a run knowing the game will end you at some point and having to do it again and again never seemed fun, so when Monster Train was ported to mobile. I assumed it would be more of the same. However, it turns out Monster Train is one of the most fun mobile games of all time.

It starts with a beautifully animated scene with a fantastic voice-over setting the scene for the game. Hell has frozen over after Heaven managed to extinguish the Pyre, and the last hope of reigniting the Inferno is being carried on a train called the Boneshaker. The player is tasked with defending this last remaining flame from the forces of the Gilded Wing while transporting it to Hell to replenish the fire.

Monster Train is a deck builder, with extra cards coming from a variety of sources through the runs, and during battles, they will endlessly cycle. Whilst the instinct will be to hoard cards, this can be detrimental as you will end up drawing five useless cards one turn and won’t be able to do anything to stop that big armoured bird bulldozing your beloved monsters. The skill of knowing when to use a card and when to pass it up is invaluable.

The most interesting thing about the battle is that the action takes place across three floors, so there's a lot of action to follow, and two key resources to manage. Every card will cost a certain number of Ember to use, and each of the three floors also has a capacity limit, with each monster taking a certain amount of space. It's an engaging balancing act between picking a high-cost, bulky monster and nothing on any other floor, or spreading out the forces.

When starting off, players will use the Hellhorned clan and their champion, the Hornbreaker Prince. It's a good starting point as the clan's deck provides a good balance of monsters and spells, and will reliably headbutt their way through battles whilst learning the finer parts of the gameplay. Through playing the game, more Clans will unlock with their own unique cards and tactics.

The Stygian Guard clan are more geared towards spellcasting as a lot of their units have the Incant status that boosts them when a spell is played on their floor. On the other hand, if big, disgustingly powerful monsters are more your speed, the Umbra clan has a Morsel mechanic that will feed its creatures buff after buff until you are dishing out 1000 damage per turn to every enemy. When starting a run it is also possible to choose a secondary Clan, so you can build a hybrid deck from both pools and create even more strategies.

As you level up the clans, new cards and artifacts will be unlocked for you to collect on each run, but crucially it will also unlock a second champion. These new characters provide a vastly different experience despite drawing from the same card pool. The first few runs using the Hornbreaker Prince champion will more likely than be focused on overwhelming the enemy with pure power, a very fun but slightly basic tactic.

When the second champion, the Shartail Queen, is unlocked, however, things get more interesting. Using the same deck, the Hellhorned becomes a minion deck, as the Queen excels at using the deck's Imp characters and its associated spells to do damage instead. It is a huge change for a small option, and impressive that the developers managed to make one set of clans cards viable with two characters each. The amount of options available for creating unique decks is astounding, and each champion has three separate upgrade paths for even more choices.

Between each battle, players will be presented with a map to travel through and one of two routes to take, with special events being scattered on both sides. There are locations such as shops to buy powerful artifacts that provide permanent boosts, or forges that allow the attachment of stat boosts to monsters and spells. The decision of what route to pick will have a huge impact on how the run unfolds.

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Monster Train