You might think that every genre fusion and mash-up has been figured out by now, but Monsters are Coming! Rock & Road is the latest game to defy that. Blending together city building, tower defence, rougelites, bullet heaven and more, this is the kind of game that can immediately grab you and not let go for run after run after run. This is a Tower-Survivor.
At the heart of Monsters Are Coming is the city. This bastion of civilisation is under siege by swarms of inky black spider-like monsters, but it’s not going to take this assault lying down. No, the city can move, lifting up from its foundations and rolling forward implacably on wheels to make a slow escape.
While you’re in charge of the city’s survival, you don’t actually play as it, or even have that god-like omniscience and control that most strategy games would give. Instead, you’re the Peon, who runs around in the wastes surrounding the city, hurriedly gathering resources to restore and improve the city, scooping up the gems and racing to aid in its defence from any enemies that start to get too close.
Through your combined efforts, fighting back the waves of enemies is initially not that taxing, but as you progress, eternally going from top to bottom, the enemies get tougher, their waves larger, and you need to improve your defences and Peon’s abilities. This taps into the Vampire Survivors style of levelling up to earn upgrades. Gather enough of the teardrop-shaped crystals that monsters leave behind and deliver them to the city, and you’ll gradually gain XP to level up.
This triggers a choice between different towers and buildings to add to your city, zooming in to a grid view where you can place structures freely. Put a tower out in a corner and it will happily be connected back to the main structure with a walkway, truly giving you full freedom to strengthen different sides of the roving fortress. However, that also means it’s potentially more difficult to have them in range of buildings that buff damage or elemental types, making every unlock a tricky little conundrum to consider for a few moments. Towers can be levelled up by plonking the same type of tower on top, but there’s no way to rearrange the layout through a run, so do try to choose wisely?
My run handed me a lot of ice elemental damage, whether it was setting off icy explosions, or spouting gouts ice to freeze and slow enemies. At the same time, a whirling buzzsaw would both hit monsters that came into range and gather up any wood that it could as well.
You can also find and earn upgrades to the Peon, adding up to four offensive abilities that automatically trigger and fire at nearby enemies, as well as bringing more passive buffs to them. I really enjoyed the Vampire Survivors vibe that this gave, but the Peon is still inherently quite squishy. Thankfully, the Peon dying is merely a momentary setback, and you’ll respawn very quickly.
Heading down the monster-filled track eventually brings you to a Shelter, providing a brief respite from the never-ending hordes, as well as a little conundrum. This always provides two paths for you to explore with the Peon, each featuring a specific minigame challenge and a resource reward for your efforts. It could be pushing a cart down track, destroying a particularly tough enemy on your own, or a number of other things that have yet to be revealed. Whatever your choice, the other path is then locked away from you, and you’re forced back to the main safe harbour within a minute or so.
Shelter itself lasts as long as you want it to, but will always end once you’ve visited the shop – it’s labelled as “Shop & Go” for a reason! This gives you a chance to spend the gold coins that you’ve gathered on new towers and districts. If you’re flush with cash, you can buy all five buildings together, giving the next stretch of your run a serious boost.
It naturally all builds up to a boss battle which, in this case, was a hefty brute that stomped circles around my city, constantly attaching itself to scenery in the surrounding world to gain invulnerability. It’s only by scuttling across with the Peon to batter a few trees or rocks that it had linked to that this could be removed and a brief window of opportunity to deal damage revealed. Thankfully, I clung on long enough.
We also got to see a tantalising glimpse of some of the other cities, biomes and challenges that will await. One of the key things that Ludogram wants to address is how easy it is to fall into a rut of relying on that one build you know that works – leaning in on fire, time and again, for example. To that end, the starter city provides a 20% boost to defence, aiding survivability for newcomers, but there’s some truly wild city types that you’ll unlock and that will completely change how you play, in addition to switching biomes having different leanings in enemy types and resources. However, there’s also just the general expansion of possibilities that will come from the roguelite metagame, unlocking new options that grow the pool of possible drops, adding more complexity and choices for you to consider.
Monsters are Coming! Rock & Road, to use its full title once more, is absolutely the kind of game I can see myself losing hours and hours to. Tower defence and bullet heaven survival games are already so satisfying in their own right, and their progeny promises much the same. I’m definitely very keen to play more, with Ludogram currently holding a closed beta test to refine it even further.