Monster Train

 8/10

 Good strategy card game. Similar to Slay The Spire but with elements of a simple tower defense. Each turn you can add creatures to the levels of your train (it has 3 levels and "the core") or play spell with various effects. Your creatures trade blows with the enemy and the remaining enemies go up to the next level of the train. If they get to the core they can fight it (if they win you lose the game). At the end of each stage, a boss shows up. When this happens creatures on the boss's floor trade blows until either the boss dies or all your creature are wiped.

Between encounters there is phase where you get to make various choices to edit your deck. There is also often an option to make the next encounter harder by giving a specific bonus to enemies in exchange for better rewards.

There is a few things I did not understand immediately while playing the game, like which creature gets to eat morsels (some kind of buff). Its the creature at the front.

Finishing one game takes about 1 hours. You can choose 2 of 5 factions and one of 25 difficulty levels when you start. Cards are progressively unlocked for future games and there is a lot of randomness so its expected that every game will be different.

I made it to the 17th difficulty level I was starting to find that the way the difficulty in increased isn't always very fun. One example is that the game adds dead weight cards to your deck, this feels very random. It feels like many strategy which were valid at the beginning of the game are not valid anymore, unles you get a specific item. The quality of items vary greatly and most of them don't enable a specific strategy. You get a bunch of random cards at the very beginning of the games and sometimes it feels like you are getting a very bad start.

Otherwise the game is very original and kept surprising me many hours in. I recommend it to fans of games like Slay The Spire. Its very similar and surprisingly different at the same time.

Slay The Spire (Early Access)

8/10

Slay The Spire is a turned based rogue like RPG where your characters actions are cards. After every encounter you may choose one of three random cards to add to your deck.

Every choice seems important, which card to add to your deck, which path of the randomly generated levels you take, which cards you play on each turn and in which order.

I found that the game is very accessible and enjoyable even if you start over when you die. It lets you make different choice and try different strategies which keeps the experience fresh.

Also when you die or complete your current run, the games give you a score which goes to unlocking more cards to pick from in the next run.

The music is similar to that of Heroes of Might And Magic. However there are few tracks and it can get repetitive.

In 20 hours I finished two runs with each character available in early access, the Ironclad and the Silent, (and died a few times also).

I will definitively come back to try the third character when the game is released.

Dungeon Of The Endless

7/10

Dungeon of the endless is a mix between a tower defense game and a rogue like game. On each level, your team start in a room with your crystal. You must protect the crystal and bring it to an elevator. You explore the level one room at a time. Monters can spawn in dark rooms or rooms you enter for the first time. Many many monsters will spawn when you try to bring the crystal. To help yourself you can power some rooms and build towers in them. Your characters can level up, use skills and wear equipment. Oh and when you lose, you can't reload or anything, you must restart a new game (which will be random and completely different).

The ambiance of the game is amazing. If it was not of the games quirks, I may rate it much higher.

The Good

There are no other games like this one that I know. The ambiance, music and style are very good. The game has a lot of re-playability because of the randomly generated levels, and many characters. It also has many game modes that completely change the rules of the game.

The Bad

The game is complex and not very good at teaching things. Sometimes it does not let you do exactly what you want to do ... unless you kown a trick. For example, you can only order characters to go in rooms, but you can't tell them where to stand or which monsters to attack, but if you tell a character to back off in a other room, and click again in the room where he is standing there is a chance he will stop where you want him to stand. The problems is that there are many tricks like that and in my experience they make the difference between finishing the game or loosing. So go learn some tricks online from other players if you want to play seriously.