I get no joy from skills and gear in games that tweak back of house stats. An upgrade that adds 0.5% to explosion radii. A helmet that multiplies your base ‘luck’ total. A god’s blessing that increases your character’s attack rate by 4%. On paper these boosts change a game, but I often find them unsatisfyingly intangible in practice. I am but a simple editor of words and, as such, numbers confuse me. If I had wanted to be up to my chin in numbers, I would have followed my uncle into the abacus-making business. (For one thing, I’m glad my house isn’t filled with loose beads waiting to be painfully trod on while barefoot.)
Which is why I’m surprised by how much I’m enjoying Monsters Are Coming, a game that if you lifted up and shook would rattle with invisible numbers like a rainstick.
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Monsters Are Coming is a mashup of Vampire Survivors and tower defense that sees you defending your motorised city from a chasing horde of red-eyed monsters. Yes, as in Philip Reeves’ Mortal Engine series, the cities in this world have been put on wheels, humanity wisely realising that to escape danger, it’s better to floor it than fight it.
Each run of this roguelite begins with your city bombing down a path shouldered by dark woods, large boulders, and glittering gold deposits. You play the city’s axe-wielding hero and must split your time between fighting off monsters and harvesting resources to feed to your city. Wood increases the fire rate of your towers, stone allows your city to repair damage, and gold can be spent in shops. Earn enough experience from killing monsters and harvesting deposits and you can earn a new toy for your city, such as a new tower or a skill upgrade.
While the towers are obviously useful – spewing flame, flinging cannonballs, and summoning minions to fight off nearby enemies – most of the upgrades you earn simply add a damage buff or a passive resource gain to your city. Yet I can look past it because developers Ludogram make the back of house stats visible in another way: every upgrade you choose is a building you must place in your town, expanding its footprint. The more upgrades you unlock, the larger your city becomes.
In a game where your path is littered with obstacles and the chasing horde will quickly overwhelm a static town, the tradeoff each upgrade brings is palpable. Yes, the Pyrotechnician’s House you’ve placed gives your fire towers a nice 5% attack damage bump, but the fact you placed it on the city’s western side means you now need to be extra vigilant of tree stumps, stone ruins, and gnarled vines in its way. In the latter stages of a run in Monsters Are Coming, I find myself sprinting ahead of the city to hack down obstacles before my city reaches them, unable to spend time harvesting the rich resource deposits on the flanks. There is a fraughtness to my play, and I enjoy that it’s because of my poor city planning or because I greedily overexpanded to boost my stats.
In the seven hours I’ve spent playing Monsters Are Coming, I’ve experimented not just with city builds, trying to find complementary towers and support buildings, but also city shapes. I began by putting towers out at the extreme edges, turning my town into a heavily-armed Greek cross. However, while that placement favoured range, cutting down monsters before they could reach my city centre, the mobile metropolis was constantly catching on obstacles. The chasing horde would quickly overrun me.
I’m now experimenting with more narrow designs, placing turrets at the front and rear of my city, only building the supporting structures in between. It keeps my city streamlined and agile, like a… well, I want to say shark, but it looks more like a sausage. Nonetheless, the monsters can’t face the amassed firepower of Little Cumberland.
Sadly, while the core of Monsters Are Coming puts an interesting twist on its invisible numbers, there are many more in the game that are presented without that same original flair. The weapon upgrades you find in chests by the roadside are mostly ‘20% increases to this’ and ‘30% increases to that’. And, unlike the city upgrades, there is no secondary impact to consider, they’re just plain and simple invisible number buffs. There is also a metaprogression system where you can spend points you earn for the distance your city travels on a run, and all the upgrades there are slight increases to stats, such as your character’s run speed or your city’s health total.
I’m enjoying Monsters Are Coming and I’ll keep playing until I’ve unlocked all the cities. For me, it’s been well worth the £6 I spent on it. But I would like to have seen the thinking that led to the city-building/upgrade payoff – a system which enriches each run – extend throughout the game’s progression systems. It could have made Monsters Are Coming truly stand out from the crowd of roguelite genre mashes.
