An Essential Upgrade For Any Trainee
The precedent was set with The Last Divinity, the expansion to the first Monster Train. It was a substantial boost to a great game with a new clan, artefacts and endgame, all for a measly £8.29. Appropriately for a game about a giant train, Monster Train 2: Destiny of the Railforged hasn’t changed track. It too arrives with a new clan, artefacts and endgame for ten pence more, at £8.39. That’s a decent rate of interest.
And just like The Last Divinity, Destiny of the Railforged knocks it out of the park. We should never doubt Big Fan Games. They know what the Trainees want.
Stoking The Forge
Let’s move from station to station. First stop is the new clan, the Railforged. Their ‘thing’ is Forge, a new keyword that’s not wholly dissimilar to the Pyreborne’s Dragon Hoard. You accumulate Forge points by ‘Smelting’ cards (exhausting them) or passively generating them through hero abilities. But instead of cashing the Dragon’s Hoard in at the end of the level, you spend them mid-level. Spells and character abilities can exhaust your Forge points for extreme mid-game benefits.
It’s not revolutionary – you’re basically accumulating and spending stacks – but it suits Monster Train 2’s rhythm. You’re stockpiling and determining when to expend the Forge points, which is always vital when a boss arrives in the final stages of a battle. Do you set yourself up now, or burst-damage on the boss at the end?
Several other mechanics supplement the Forge. I’m a fan of Pyrespeak, which gets the normally lonely Pyre involved. It tends to boost the attack and health of the Pyre (meh) so that the Pyre can then join the attack in the lower floors (meh…oh, wait, cool!). You may already be thinking about some of the Pyres and their buffs, as there are combos at play here. Weaponcraft allows units to generate their own equipment and even slot in more than one, which is probably getting Lazarus fans salivating. And Burst is basically a degrading Multistrike, which – considering how essential Multistrike is – is rather fab. You may want to save it for the boss, though.
I didn’t find the Railforged to be super-strong standalone – they mostly enable allied factions – but they were fun to play, and the two Railforged heroes, Herzal and Heph neatly represent two sides of the Railforged coin, emphasising Forge and equipment generation.
All Aboard The Soul Train
The next stop is Soul Savior, Monster Train 2’s answer to The Last Divinity. It’s clearly juicing up the endgame (not that Monster Train 2 necessarily needed more in that area) with a kind of concentrated boss run. The cadence of bosses is completely different from a conventional run: you face only one battle before each big-boss, and there are five big-bosses in total. Monster Train 2: Destiny of the Railforged has little interest in you ramping up your cards before the harder match-ups: instead, it throws you into them almost immediately, and then pulls that trick five times in succession.
You have no choice but to catch up quickly. Which is difficult when your deck is loaded with starter cards. The new bosses are all utter swines, too, scaling exponentially mid-battle in some cases. There’s no room for weakness, and it’s entirely possible to spend your first runs dying to the first bosses.
Souls Are The MVP
Salvation comes in the form of Souls and the Soulforge. These are new Soul Savior-spanning artifacts that provide imbalanced, frankly ridiculous benefits. They are the heart and soul (ha!) of Monster Train 2: Destiny of the Railforged, and they elevate it to the score you see below. If every game could come with something similar to these doohickeys, we’d be very happy indeed.
You can only socket one soul at the start of Monster Train 2: Destiny of the Railforged, but that ratchets eventually up to three. You can also gain Souls within the run itself, and we’ve had up to five at once. They provide the much-needed power hike that allows you to at least compete with the Lifemother and her brood.
I love how over-the-top and imbalanced they are. My favourite is Showtime, which super-sizes one of the train floors randomly. The front unit becomes gargantuan, with increased everything, and you can slot in a larger number of units thanks to increased floorspace. Another favourite is Mimic, which lets you bring in the allied champion as well as the primary champion. They don’t level up in the same way as your hero does, but it blows the meta open.
Now imagine five of these disruptors. It’s huge. They’re possible because Monster Train 2: Destiny of the Railforged is something of a closed system: you’re largely playing to upgrade your Souls and collect more of them, rather than contribute to the wider game. Obviously, you’re moving through the levels of your clans – including the new Railforged – but that’s largely it.
But what a motivation the Souls are. They can be ranked up themselves, taken to ranks I, II and III, and the imbalance goes stratospheric. The whole game feels heightened. I found a constant push to play in a certain way, just because of the Souls and what they might become. I’d have liked fewer that focused on killing the Lifemother (it just makes the unlocks a tad one-note), but they’re generally awesome.
Carrying Over The Base Game’s Flaws
If Monster Train 2: Destiny of the Railforged has flaws, they are consistent with the main game. Monster Train 2: Destiny of the Railforged comes loaded with story moments, and I can’t bring myself to care. This was true of Monster Train and Monster Train 2 too, so it’s not unique. I’m sure someone is eager to lap up the lore, but they’re not me. The Lifemother just comes across as a bigger fish beyond the big fish from the base game.
And Monster Train 2: Destiny of the Railforged doesn’t solve the slight cognitive load and mess of the base game. If anything it adds to it: there are yet more keywords to learn, perhaps proportionally more than any clan so far. If you want to play well, making all the right purchases and mid-game choices, then you can be stuck in an analysis paralysis. But that’s par for the course with Monster Train: playing casually, you can’t treat it as precisely as other deckbuilders. Sometimes you have to ride on vibes.
A Locomotive-Sized Helping of Heavenly Mayhem
Much like Monster Train’s The Last Divinity, Monster Train 2’s Destiny of the Railforged is a large, emphatic step for an already very good game. It does exactly what you would hope it would do: it introduces a meta-disrupting new clan, and tosses a whole new endgame your way. It’s brutal and expects the world from you.
But it’s the unexpected that makes this a winner. The Souls mechanic, an upgradeable new artifact system, is a peach. It makes Monster Train 2 more overblown and ludicrous than it was before, all while tempting us to replay over and over. More of this in Monster Train 3, if you please.
Important Links
Monster Train 2: Destiny of the Railforged Expands The Battle Beyond The Game Pass Track – https://www.thexboxhub.com/monster-train-2-destiny-of-the-railforged-expands-the-battle-beyond-the-game-pass-track/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/monster-train-2-destiny-of-the-railforged/9pl6slrsrgdc
