Monster Train 2 Seems On Track For More Card-Based Thrills
Just today, Monster Train 2, a sequel to an excellent roguelike deckbuilder that came out around five years ago, was announced for a 2025 release. The original combined the card drafting fun of games like Slay the Spire with tower defense elements, as you deployed critters to battle heavenly armies hellbent on subjugating the underworld. We got a chance to play an early build of its follow-up, and thankfully, it is more of a very good thing. While admittedly, the changes here feel more incremental than transformational, this demo was a blast, adding tons of new cards to wrap your head around and gameplay additions that introduced even more depth.
In the previous game, your objective was to protect a train with the last embers of the underworld from invading angels, but this time around, the forces of heaven and hell are united against a common foe: the Titans. There seems to be a tad more emphasis on storytelling in this sequel (mostly because the narrative isn’t entirely contained in an introductory cutscene), but the most exciting aspect of this unlikely alliance between demons and seraphim is that it means new creature cards, spells, and more. Just like the first game, you pick a combination of two clans when starting a playthrough, with each corresponding to the pool of cards you can draft from over the run. There will be five clans, all of which are new, which means there’s a boatload of fresh cards.
The basic rules and systems are the same in this sequel. You conduct a train through nine areas, visiting stops along the way that let you upgrade your cards, trash what you don’t want, encounter randomized events, and so on. Compared to other card games, the main twist is how battles play out: during each encounter, you have to defend against waves of enemies. You summon monsters that guard these floors as your minions chip away at the incoming bad guys like in a tower defense game, whittling them down so they (hopefully) don’t get to the final room and take a chunk out of your Pyre’s health. And while these soldiers are a stable source of damage, you also have spell cards that can hit adversaries in the back line, boost your allies, and hinder your foes.
As for how Monster Train 2 alters this formula, one big addition is the new card types: equipment and rooms. Equipment works exactly like you would expect, and each creature you summon can be equipped with one item that offers a potentially game-changing power-up, like a shield that deals Revenge damage back to attackers based on the equipped creature’s total HP or the Cursed Twinblade, which adds the ever-important Multistrike modifier (this makes you attack an additional time each turn) but saps your attack power each time you strike. On top of this, there are also Room cards, which let you add modifiers to specific floors, like triggering status effects additional times or granting bonuses after landing a kill. And lastly, now some creatures have abilities that run on cooldowns, adding another tactical layer.
But really, the thing that freshens up this experience is the presence of the new clans. Like with the previous game, the lynchpin of a clan’s strategy usually comes from its Champion card, powerful one-of-a-kind heroes that you upgrade over the course of a run. Of the factions shown off, we got to play as the Banished, angels fighting against their former allies, and the Pyreborne, a group of dragons and whelps begrudgingly throwing in with their old enemies. The Banished are largely built around the Valor keyword, a status effect that boosts attack power while also generating armor each turn while that ally is in the front row. Meanwhile, the Pyreborne love to use Pyregel on their foes, a detrimental status effect that causes those afflicted to take extra damage for each stack. Much of the fun of the original game came from finding ways to use each clan’s status effects to keep up with increasingly deadly waves, and that core loop is entirely intact. Basically, you want your deck to scale up so that you’re prepared to fight both the damage-sponging final bosses and their hordes of cronies. In my first win, my strategy was to stack up as much Pyrogel as possible so that when my guys started swinging, they were dealing boatloads of extra damage. I had a blast coming up with combinations to take advantage of these new ways to play, and it’s a testament to this core formula that it sucked me right back in.
That said, if I have one concern with this follow-up, it’s that it is admittedly very similar to its predecessor, functioning more like a great new booster set than a top-to-bottom reimagining of the rules. My main worry with this is that while I enjoyed theorycrafting deck combinations, the core loop of finding ways to scale your monsters using status effects was so similar to the previous game that people like myself who’ve spent dozens of hours with the original may burn out quickly. And considering the general abundance of card games these days, some of which entirely reinvent the genre, it remains to be seen if this installment will have the same staying power as what came before.
Still, right now, that’s just abstract speculation because my first few runs with Monster Train 2 have been a blast, combining engaging deckbuilding with lots of small strategic decisions that piled up. Sure, there have been plenty of deckbuilders in recent years, but Monster Train stood out thanks to its great card design and novel tower defense-esque twist on the template. From what I’ve seen, it seems very possible its sequel will do the same. It may be familiar, but when you have a gameplay loop this satisfying, more of the same is a good thing.
Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.