Gaming: Monster Train 2 Dlc Is Very Good: The Railforged, A Challenging New...

Destiny of the Railforged adds juiced enemies, steampunk robots that can smelt cards, and a handy claw machine.

After playing a DNA-altering amount of Monster Train 2 over the holiday break, I felt like I was entering the twilight of my time with the game. 370 hours, 127 wins against the Titans—I was still enjoying filling out my logbook with wins, but I'd gotten everything and more that I'd needed out of the game, and my preferences for units and spells had calcified to the point of predictability.

After spending a week with a pre-release build of Destiny of the Railforged, my enthusiasm is renewed. Though the DLC doesn't touch every aspect of Monster Train 2 (there are no new Alcove events, for example), it's a substantial package that makes an already large experience feel supersized.

Also there's a card that lets you grab units—friendly or enemy—with a giant claw and move them to another floor, which feels cool as hell. Yoink.

The two new clans, Railforged (DLC) and Wurmkin (free, available outside the DLC), are meaningfully distinct from the existing roster. Railforged have multiple new mechanics and Wurmkin's room-boosting Charged Echo mechanic makes a welcome return.

Wurmkin, like Melting Remnant, don't have deep cross-interaction with other clans because their spells are so focused on earning and spending Echoes, which have various floor-specific effects. Railforged have much more universality, and I've liked them more than Wurmkin because their design feels so thematically linked with their identity as anvil-smacking Hephaestus lookalikes.

Railforged's smelting mechanic is my favorite thing the clan can do—it opens up fun, newfound strategies and adds value to higher-cost cards. Smelting consumes a card in your hand, melting it down into energy and forge. Some Railforged units produce unplayable scrap metal cards that persist in your hand but "refine" each turn to increase the energy and forge they output. In practice it's sort of like being able to turn any card in your hand into Kindle. But you can also smelt blight cards—the feeling of flipping a harmful curse into raw resources is great. On some runs I was deliberately drafting Calcified Embers just to have them available to smelt.

I have struggled to survive the early game in standard Covenant 10 runs with Railforged, who lack high base attack units and do not have damage spells in either starter deck to ping off weak enemies. They're tuned in a way that challenges you to smartly emplo

Source: PC Gamer