Quick! Put the Kettle On!
Described on its Steam page as a “Tower-Survivor rogue-lite”, Monsters are Coming! Is one of those games that presents you with a seemingly impossible task and expects you to die repeatedly, gaining a little of that one type of currency every time you get overwhelmed that you can put into permanent upgrades, thus making those initially insurmountable odds gradually become more and more surmountable. This one sees you taking on the role of an heroic individual guiding a fully upgradeable, Mortal Engines-style tracked city as it trundles through hostile wastelands beset by hordes of grotesque, shadowy, red-eyed abominations in an attempt to reach a safe place known as the Ark.
It's an interesting premise filled with potential for addictive strategy and it can certainly make for a gripping experience once your wheeled metropolis starts moving. The city will try to always be moving from the top of the long, thin maps to the bottom, only stopping when rocks or trees block its path, or when it reaches an outpost where the ceaseless horde is temporarily blocked by enormous iron fences. It's your job to not only ensure the city keeps trundling on by smashing stuff that gets in its way, but also to fight off any monsters that get too close, as well as harvest various resources to bolster the city's defences, enable repairs, and pay for extra buildings and towers at the shops encountered in the safe zones. All the while, an all-encompassing mass of red eyes and black tendrils follows, ready to consume anything that it catches.
The key to survival is to carefully balance resource gathering with fighting off monsters, and to level your tower wisely, adding buildings whose effects complement your strongest towers. There are a number of ways you can go with this, meaning that no two attempts to reach the Ark need be the same. I've seen lots of people in online discussions recommending a “minion” build that uses towers that summon various minions to fight and claim resources, and then attach various buildings that bolster minion effectiveness. I've found the most success going for a full-on explosives build, however, using towers that cause area-of-effect damage and then concentrating on support buildings that strengthen explosions and increase the AOE size. The screen starts looking really crazy once the explosion circumference exceeds reasonable bounds, let em tell you. I think that's why my eye has been twitching for the last week or so.
There are several hero options for the player to control, all of which have special skills that affect progress in interesting ways. The default hero, the guard, is a fighty little guy who gets bonus experience from enemies, but there's a joker you can unlock who can randomly exchange weapons for stat boosts, a lumberjack who is better at claiming resources, and a king, whose memorial building boosts the towers around it when he gets killed. All of these characters can be equipped with various weapons beyond their starting equipment, too, further expanding customisability.
There are also various town halls you can choose which have different effects, like needing wood to continue moving or not gaining experience from monsters but gaining extra experience from resources. The various heroes and town halls represent lots of different ways to subtly or significantly change the gameplay experience and offer lots of potential hours of play for experimental players.
The developers of Monsters are Coming! (known as Ludogram) chose to use a clean, modern, 2D cartoony art style for the visuals. The hero characters are stylish and have personality, and the monster horde manages to look sleek and sort-of-cute while still being ominous, especially when that black cloud of red eyes is moving quickly in from the flanks after a little side mission. I do think that the visuals can lack clarity and feedback. It's easy to lose sight of what your individual towers are doing when things start to get hectic, and this can reach ridiculous levels if you've chosen to pursue the aforementioned explosives build, as the screen is so full of fiery detonations that you can barely see a thing. Seriously, if you fully upgrade explosion radius and pack your city with explosion-based towers things can get really crazy. At one point I could only tell where my hero character was by the little health bar moving around amongst the explosive glare and chaos.
While that was kind of fun, this lack of clarity does affect the game in other places, too. It's one of those rogue-lites where the incremental upgrades, specifically the permanent ones unlocked in the progression menu between runs, seem to have minimal effect on gameplay, meaning that progression doesn't feel as satisfying as it should do. Sometimes it's hard to tell what a building or tower is actually doing as well, especially if you find a tower you haven't officially unlocked yet during a run and plonk it into a corner of your city to do its thing amidst the chaos, because in those instances, you don't get an explanation as to what the tower actually does. Even when you do get an explanation it's not always clear. I may well be a big dummy, but I still don't really know what ice and fiery alchemist buildings actually do, for example.
I still enjoy escorting my giant, trundling, explosive-launching city of doom though, even if I can't really bring myself to fully understand the intricacies of what's going on in its mobile streets and plazas. While Monsters are Coming! will certainly have you enthralled in the action while you're playing, it's not one of those games that I think is likely to grip you for months on end, but is still great to have in your Steam library for those times when you do fancy a few runs into the monster-infested wilds with an entire municipality rumbling behind you. After all, where else are you going to get that kind of action outside of Mortal Engines and Howl's Moving Castle? Exactly.