Monster Train 2 Demo Preview - Unique Deckbuilding At Its Finest

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I have played a lot of deckbuilding roguelikes over the past couple of years, and they all generally feel the same. You are on a 2D plane attacking the foes in front of you, playing cards to attack, buff, and debuff. It isn't a terrible gameplay loop, but I haven't seen a good amount of variety to keep it interesting. That almost instantly changed when I tried Monster Train 2. While I knew of the first game, I never had a chance to try it out. But I had the chance to try the sequel's demo before it was released, which it did today, and I was head over heels.

Instead of the traditional loop of fighting directly with different attacks, you instead focus more on outfitting the train with units and buffing them up. You start each match with cards to place down monsters on one of three vertical rooms to face off enemies barging in. Once you place your team, you will gain new cards, which could contain more units to place, buffs for your team, or spells to damage and debuff the enemies. Once your turn is done, everyone will attack each other automatically once before the enemies move up a room.

The goal is to stop the monsters before they reach the fourth room at the top and try to destroy your pyre. Putting the focus on outfitting your team throughout the train rather than just focusing on each individual battle is intriguing and really kept me on my toes. It was definitely a learning curve, and I would still say I have more to learn, but this is the type of experience that motivates me to try and get better. You can even tackle on extra challenges to your battles for more currency to use to upgrade your cards, which is a nice touch if you want to risk it for some solid rewards.

Unlike the previous game, there are new types of cards to further augment your team, like equipment cards to buff your team and room cards to boost the entire room. Pair this with the new clans you can choose from and ways to further augment and get new cards and units to use, as well as unique events you can encounter to gather new cards, it looks like Monster Train 2 is going to be an incredible deckbuilding roguelike that is worth investing your time into, especially with endless mode coming to this entry!

On the Steam Deck side, there seem to be no issues whatsoever. I was playing at 90 FPS with a battery drain that never shot above 12W. The first game was rated Playable due to small text, but I haven't noticed anything like this in the demo, so I wouldn't be surprised if it gets the Verified badge. Monster Train 2 is shaping up to not only be a fantastic game, but one that could be an essential to have on your Steam Deck.

The demo for Monster Train 2 is out now to try for yourself, and you can wishlist it ahead of its release.

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