izigame.me

Monster Train 2 is my new favourite deckbuilder but this comes to no surprise because Monster Train 1 was my favourite before this. I have over 600 hours in the first game and I can see myself putting the same amount of time in here.
Monster Train 2 is set directly after the last game. After Seraph was defeated by the player he retreats back to Heaven and makes a deal with three tians, powerful beings from beyond this world. The titans corrupt the forces of heaven and turn them into horrible monsters. Now hell is fighting to free heaven from the titans grasp and put an end to the conflict once and for all.
The gameplay of MT2 is very close to the first game but with some meaningful differences. During combat there is now a new deployment phase which allows you to place your banner units in your train before the actual combat starts. This makes it easier to set up your strategy without relying on draw luck. Another new addition are room and equipment cards. Equipment can be placed on a unit to give it better stats and new abilities while room cards to the same but for an entire floor. You can only equip one of those per unit or floor, so the player has to mke some strategic decisions depending on his build. Personally I love these new additions because they complement the natural abilities of your cards. Some units also now have active abilities that you can manually launch whenever you need them.
There are also smaller changes that make the game much more comfortable to play. Shops now have four upgrades instead of three and you can now restart a single turn or even the entire battle if you made a mistake. Even the small change of changing the train stewards, the starting units, to be split into tanking units and damage dealers makes sense because now players can decide which unit to ditch first depending on their first banner draft.
Just like MT1 you have five very unique clans to play as. The devs made sure these clans feels fresh with new mechanics that have meaningful synergies.
The Banished are a clan of exiled Angels that decided to ally themselves with hell to free heaven. Their unique mechanic is Vigor which increases attack damage but also has the unique interaction to give armor if the unit is on the frontline. They complement this by having many spells and abilities that put their units on the front to benefit from both bonuses of vigor.
The Pyreborn are stereotypical greedy dragons. They can generate gold from direct attacks or create a dragon hoard that the player can loot between battles. bigger hoards do not only yield more gold but also artifacts including those you can normally only get from bosses. They also have the unique mechanic of pyregel which increases all damage a unit receives, including spells, attacks, debuffs and even artifacts.
The Luna Coven is a magic focused clan that has access to conduit, a mechanic that increases the power of damaging and healing spells. They also create armor on overheals. But their most unique mechanic is the moon. Depending on the moon phase, their units and spells get different bonuses with the full moon being more spell focused while the new moon is more focused on raw stats.
Underlegion is my favourite clan because they have one of the best emchanics ever, propagate. Propagate increases buffs on your units and debuffs on enemies and this works with any status effect including hard to increase ones like damage shield. It also works perfectly with their own unique status effects, decay and troop. Decay is a damage debuff similiar to frostbite from the first game but much more potent. Troop on the other hand is a very unqiue unit mechanic in which you create a special "funguy" unit from spells which is stacked on top of each other, creating a powerful unit made from multiple small ones.
Lazarus League is the last clan and they can be best described as "Frankenstein" faction. Their leader is a crazy scientist who conducts unethical experiments, creating horrible monstrosities which are supported by expendable assistants. Their unique mechanics are unstable and reanimate. Unstable creates a debuff that explodes if a unit falls under its stack value and deals damage to its value. This can create chain reactions in which multiple units explode at the same turn and you can even use it on your own units. Reanimate on the other hand revives a dead unit but only with a single HP. But this status effect can be stacked, which means you can tank multiple hits without actually dying.
Besides new clans you also can now select your pyre heart. This gives your pyre room different starting stats but also new abilities you can use. It's anew mechanic that allows players to get even more creative with their builds.
What makes MT2 so much fun is that this game embraces overpowered builds. The game will always tell you after a run what your best stats where and will encourage you to go even higher on your next run. Games like Balatro have proven that "numbers go big" is a satisfying gameplay loop and Monster Train nails this perfectly.
The game also features an amazing soundtrack from Jordan Chin, this time more intense than the last game, fitting for a game in which the stakes are now higher.
But there is also something that really cements why this game is so great but since this is a heavy gameplay spoiler I suggest you to only read further if you don't mind to be spoiled.
After you have unlocked half of the pyre hearts you get a cutscene that unlocks all the clans fromt he first game. That's right, the devs are so crazy, they put the entirety of MT1 in MT2! Not only that, they also rebalanced all those clans so they fit better into the new environment of MT2, making even some of the worse cards finally playable. This gives the player 180 different clan combinations how he can play the game.
Absolute madlads that deserve all my praise!