25 hours played, this game has been growing on me as well. Though I too would like it if there was more room for creative improvisation, as in Slay the Spire, rather than strict optimization. A lot of the units have just outright fun concepts, and it would be nice if mixing and matching them more freely would make gameplay sense. Often I just do so anyway, even if it means that I’m less likely to win. (This might explain why I still mostly lose even on Covenant Rank 1.)
An interesting thing that I’ve noticed, and people seem to agree with, is that the game feels shorter than Slay the Spire despite one run taking about the same time in real-world minutes. (My successful StS runs are about 1-2 hours; Monster Train, about an hour and a half.) When I finished my first run, I assumed that it was just the first world, since it felt roughly like the end of the first act in StS. That’s an interesting psychological observation by itself. Seems to be a result of the upgrade-battle-upgrade loop having been reduced to a much smaller number of battles and upgrade points, but with those points being correspondingly larger.
25 hours played, this game has been growing on me as well. Though I too would like it if there was more room for creative improvisation, as in Slay the Spire, rather than strict optimization. A lot of the units have just outright fun concepts, and it would be nice if mixing and matching them more freely would make gameplay sense.
At 220 hours played and with Covenant 25 wins on 14 of the base game’s 20 possible class pairings, I don’t feel this way anymore. Improvisation and relentless optimization aren’t opposed; the need for relentless optimization just requires me to improvise better. It just required getting familiar enough with the mechanics and cards to be able to do that.
25 hours played, this game has been growing on me as well. Though I too would like it if there was more room for creative improvisation, as in Slay the Spire, rather than strict optimization. A lot of the units have just outright fun concepts, and it would be nice if mixing and matching them more freely would make gameplay sense. Often I just do so anyway, even if it means that I’m less likely to win. (This might explain why I still mostly lose even on Covenant Rank 1.)
An interesting thing that I’ve noticed, and people seem to agree with, is that the game feels shorter than Slay the Spire despite one run taking about the same time in real-world minutes. (My successful StS runs are about 1-2 hours; Monster Train, about an hour and a half.) When I finished my first run, I assumed that it was just the first world, since it felt roughly like the end of the first act in StS. That’s an interesting psychological observation by itself. Seems to be a result of the upgrade-battle-upgrade loop having been reduced to a much smaller number of battles and upgrade points, but with those points being correspondingly larger.
At 220 hours played and with Covenant 25 wins on 14 of the base game’s 20 possible class pairings, I don’t feel this way anymore. Improvisation and relentless optimization aren’t opposed; the need for relentless optimization just requires me to improvise better. It just required getting familiar enough with the mechanics and cards to be able to do that.