A City On Wheels In Constant Danger
Monsters Are Coming! Rock & Road is one of those games that happily raids the entire genre buffet. It mixes survival, resource gathering, tower defence, roguelike runs, city building and the auto attacking chaos made popular by Vampire Survivors.
The core idea is simple but clever. Your city is literally on wheels, slowly rolling along a dangerous road while endless waves of monsters chase it down. You control a hero who automatically fires their weapons, and your city does the same with its towers and buildings. You are not just defending a base. You are protecting a moving fortress that can crumble if it takes too much punishment.
If your hero dies it is not game over. You just drop a grave in your city and a new hero spawns to keep fighting. The real loss condition is the city itself. Once it takes too much damage and collapses the run ends and you start over with what you have unlocked so far.
This setup gives every run a nice tension. Your hero needs to help the city survive but there is always something tempting you away from its safety.
Risky Exploration And Smart City Building
The road your city travels along is not just a highway of doom. Off to the sides you will find scattered resources like trees, rocks and gold ore. To grab those you need to temporarily leave the safety of your city and sprint out into the danger zones.
Each resource feeds into a different part of your strategy.
- Wood slowly increases the attack speed of all your city towers when fed back into it.
- Stone is used to repair damage to your rolling fortress.
- Gold lets you buy more buildings from merchants that appear along the route.
It sounds straightforward, but it leads to constant push and pull decisions. Do you stay close and babysit your city or risk running off to punch some trees for a late game power spike
The game loves to punish greed in funny ways. You might be busy mining away, only to get a warning that your city has snagged on a rock or root. If it stops rolling the monsters close in and start hammering at it while you sprint back in a mild panic.
The real long term depth comes from how you build that city. You have a limited grid of tiles on which to place buildings. Every time you level up you do not simply get more damage or health, you are offered three random buildings and must pick one. Towers, farms, factories, crypts and more all interact and combo in different ways.
Because your options are random you can not rigidly follow one single build order. Instead you are always adapting to what the game offers and hunting for fun synergies. It is not so complex that you need a spreadsheet, but landing on a strong combo feels very satisfying.
For example you can use laborer buildings to boost the area of effect of mortar towers until they are carpet bombing huge groups of enemies. Or you can go full necromancer, using crypts and reliquaries to summon endless waves of undead minions that swarm everything trying to reach your city.
Placement also affects how your city physically behaves. Extending as wide as possible gives your towers more reach but also creates a massive target that gets stuck more easily on obstacles. Focusing defences on the front, back or sides changes where your hero needs to stand during intense attacks. A long narrow city might be easier to steer through cluttered terrain but leaves certain angles weaker.
City Types, Progression And Why It Hooks You
To keep runs fresh Monsters Are Coming gives you different base city types to unlock as you play. There are 10 in total and each one twists the rules a little to create new challenges and playstyles.
One great example is the Mirror City. If you place a building on one side of it the same building appears automatically on the opposite side. This lets you create perfectly symmetrical layouts that would make any min maxer happy. The trade off is that those duplicated buildings are weaker than normal and you run out of space much faster.
That forces you to think about which buildings are worth doubling. Maybe you mirror key buffing structures or key damage towers, while accepting that some other buildings will not keep up. Every city type asks you to learn a new trick like that which helps the game stay fresh over many runs.
The building variety is surprisingly large. Looking at the full unlock screen you can see a big roster of structures aimed at different strategies from economy engines to defensive walls to pure mayhem damage dealers. Experimenting with combinations is a big part of the fun.
Progression is where things get a little bumpy. A lot of new content is locked behind specific challenges that are not always clearly explained. Sometimes it is not obvious what you should aim for to unlock that next city type or building set. It can feel a bit awkward to figure out the most efficient way to keep earning new toys.
Despite that the core loop is strong enough to keep pulling you back in. Runs are short and punchy, the random building choices give you interesting decisions every couple of minutes, and seeing your latest strange architectural experiment somehow hold off a massive wave of monsters never really gets old.
If you like games that mix chill planning with sudden panicked action, this one hits a sweet spot between strategy and chaos. Monsters Are Coming! Rock & Road is out now on Steam with a small launch discount, and it is well worth a look if you enjoy roguelike city builders, tower defence or the auto attack swarm style of Vampire Survivors.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/roguelike/this-brilliantly-strategic-roguelike-challenges-you-to-build-a-whole-city-on-wheels-and-keep-it-one-step-ahead-of-an-unending-horde-of-monsters/
