Monster Train
BANGER · Roguelike · 2020
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $24.99.
- Length
- 3.3h
- Value
- $7.57/hr
- Reviews
- 96% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, IGP or better, 2 GB of storage. Windows only.
Monster Train is a strategic roguelike deck building game with a twist. Set on a train to hell, you’ll use tactical decision making to defend multiple vertical battlegrounds. With real time competitive multiplayer and endless replayability, Monster Train is always on time.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $2.49, set in February 2025. 55 discounts in the 6 years on record. They run about 70 percent off, roughly 5 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was this month, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 3 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 93 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 96 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Balatro ($14.99, scores 95) beats it on value, while it beats LONESTAR ($5.19, scores 73).
Critics scored it 86. Players sit 10 points higher at 96 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 6 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written April 2021 to September 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 8 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 355 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 309 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 84 percent of the 707 reviews written there were positive, against 96 percent overall, and those are 4 percent of everything written about it.
HowLongToBeat players log 3.3 hours as a typical playtime, and completionists log 97, 29 times as much.
It came out 6 years ago and 595 were still playing it at the last check.
The drop-off
97% start to 14% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
595 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Monster Train and Slay the Spire are the two excellent card games, and I'm someone who doesn't really like card games. Those two games are also significantly different, so if you have one you're likely to enjoy the other without it being more of the same.
Has one weird fundamental flaw, which is that the cards you draft aren't significantly better than your starting cards. The result is that you are better off not engage with the drafting much, and the less you unlock the easier it is to have a consistent deck.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Monster Train scores 88/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1102190/monster-trainThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 18, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.