Four out of six runs have been victories so far. I am up to Cov 4 now. I am kind of obsessed with this game now. I have to force myself to stop playing it.
Welcome to the club!
Agh, I was feeling really good about my first Umbra run, which I did on Cov 1 just to give myself a break from the ratchet. Crucible Warden + Morsel Maker + Morsel Master was pretty much unstoppable, until Seraph stopped it with 91 health left. >.<
This is 70% off on Steam for the weekend. I finally picked it up and love it! Also, I think it’s the first game I’ve not had to adjust the resolution manually to get it to look decent on SteamLink on my iPad.
Oh yeah, I’ve spent many an hour on iPad via stream link. Glad you like it.
One question. What happened with the expansion? I noticed yesterday that while the base game has a 92-96% in user reviews, the expansion (whose description sounds like it’s meaty enough) is only at 76%.
Since your question is about the Steam reviews, can’t you just check them? Honest question, I’m not trying to taunt you. Filtering by only negative reviews and skimming a couple often gives a good general impression about the “mood” of Steam reviews to me.
In this case it’s almost universally balance and difficulty related. DLC components are too hard, forcing you into fewer OP directions, they say.
I played the DLC when they had a free beta test week of it and it didn’t convince me to buy either. Unlike Slay the Spire Monster Train is very much focused around finding excessively strong combos and upgrades. In the DLC that wasn’t very rewarding or fun. Too easy to get OP stuff while at the same time too restrictive as most of the stuff offered is just untakable garbage.
Have not messed with the DLC, but I can see how that could be the case. At its heart MT is all about getting multiplicative combos in place.
I play loads of Monster Train, and the expansion only brings good things, in my opinion. Adds a ton of depth and strategy that doesn’t exist in the base game. I was worried about buying it early on too, thinking I wasn’t quite good enough at the game an that getting the DLC would make it even harder, but the expansion is only as difficult as you make it. That is, you can do a run and choose not to interact with the DLC parts of it (collecting pact shards, which can then allow you fight the DLC boss) yet still allow you access to the new cards and clan that the DLC offers.
Further, you can simply choose to enable and disable the DLC at will on the title screen if you wish to play a run without it enabled at all. There are even two different daily challenges available according to whether you have the DLC enabled or not.
I can’t imagine why the DLC would get lower review scores. It seems to me (from frequenting the Monster Train Discord an Reddit) that most people are in fact exclusively playing with the DLC, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say a negative thing about it.
It’s fantastic content, and I highly recommend it!
Also, there is one Youtuber I watch who I highly recommend called RisingDusk. I owe almost all of my ability in the game to his content. His videos are quite long (an hour on average, sometimes longer, sometimes shorters) but he does a fantastic job explaining his thought processes throughout a run and why things are good or bad. His “Cursed Seeds” runs are especially good, because people send him seeds of runs that seem to have the worst RNG and he manages to win them. He’s super smart (he apparently works for NASA or something) so I can see he’s so good at this.
His content is almost exclusively with the DLC though (he has older videos pre-DLC) and he counts “winning” as beating the Divinity (the DLC boss), so bear that in mind if you decide to watch his stuff.
I love this game, and the expansion. But it’s really hard to beat the last boss on Level 25 without some good luck on exponential combos.
iOS release is out
if you’re an iOS user and you’re idly wondering whether this is a good one, let this random voice be the one that moves you: it was my game of the year when it came out, full stop. All aboard!!
My wife and I started a year-long competition to see who would win the most Hell Rushes, head to head, from 1/1 to 1/1.
I’m trying to stall for another two months. :D
Really happy to have this as a native iOS app and looking forward to falling in love all over again. However, the UI needs a tweak:
the iOS version desperately needs the feature from PC where a card enlarges while the mouse (here, a finger) is held over it and swiping back and forth lets you see your cards more easily.
I played MT extensively (50+ hours) on my iPad over steam link and this worked beautifully. In this version, the scaling of the UI seems a bit different and it rapidly becomes impossible to tell what cards in hand are, even if you are familiar with the game.
I’m up 158 to 157 with four days to go after blowing a four-game lead this week…
It’s really cool it’s such a close competition!
We’ve both blown 15+ game leads throughout the year where it looked like it was over.
I took one last night to make it 159-157…
No games last night. She’s gotten stuck into Cult of the Lamb but wants to set aside two MT games each of the next three nights…
It’s all over folks!
Two nights ago she took the first and I the second.
Last night I swept the pair to go up 162-158.
Today I agreed to play til she lost and after she won the first I finished it of with Mr. Titansbane.
163-159 in 365 days.
If anybody has been playing a lot of Hell Rush this year my name is WeJe and she’s jennamenna. We’ve seen a lot of regulars.