Monsters are Coming!

Defending a city that won't stay still

Monsters are Coming! is developed by Ludogram and published by Raw Fury, released 20 November 2025. Its pitch mashes together two genres that don't usually share space: tower defence's methodical base-building and Vampire Survivors-style horde combat, with a specific structural twist that sets it apart from either — the "base" players are defending is an ever-moving city, travelling continuously across the map rather than sitting fixed in one location. Runs task players with gathering resources, placing towers and defences on the fly, and personally fighting off hordes of monsters as a controllable character, all while making sure the city's path forward stays clear. It's a genuinely distinctive structural idea for a genre that's grown crowded since Vampire Survivors popularised the horde-shooter format, and reviewers across the spectrum credit the concept itself as fresh even when they're deeply critical of its execution.

A concept reviewers like more than the game underneath it

The praise that recurs across Monsters are Coming!'s review corpus concentrates specifically on premise and presentation rather than systems. Reviewers consistently describe the moving-city hook as genuinely novel, and art direction draws broad, repeated credit for being colourful and immediately appealing — several reviewers specifically note the strong first impression the visuals and core concept made before deeper issues set in. A meaningful minority of dedicated players who pushed through the game's harder difficulty tiers push back directly against the broader critical consensus, arguing the difficulty is a deliberate, rewarding design choice rather than a flaw, and that reviewers describing a lack of player agency simply haven't engaged deeply enough with the game's actual systems. One detailed review, written after fully completing the game's achievements and tower unlocks, argues explicitly that the negative review corpus is skewed by players who wanted their hand held through a genre built around genuine challenge.

Where the systems fall short for most reviewers

That defence is a real, documented position within the review base, but it's a minority one. The dominant, far more numerous complaint describes Monsters are Coming!'s upgrade and progression systems as shallow relative to both its premise and its genre peers. Multiple detailed reviews independently describe tower and hero upgrades as almost entirely flat percentage increases — "+10% size, +20% damage," as one puts it — with essentially no meaningful synergy between choices, leaving successive runs feeling largely interchangeable regardless of what's unlocked. Difficulty draws a related, specific and heavily repeated complaint: several reviewers describe clearing normal-mode content with little resistance, only to hit a sudden, severe spike entering harder difficulties where towers and characters that felt powerful moments earlier become unable to meaningfully damage stronger enemies. Meta-progression, the system meant to bridge that gap over repeated runs, draws its own specific frustration — reviewers describe grinding for hours toward stat increases as small as three to five percent, a pace several call disproportionate to the actual difficulty wall those increases are supposed to help players clear.

Stability compounds these complaints for a specific, vocal group of reviewers. Multiple detailed reviews describe the game crashing during longer sessions, particularly in its endless mode, with no mid-run save feature to fall back on — meaning a crash after two or more hours of building toward a strong run wipes that progress entirely rather than preserving any of it. More than one reviewer frames this specifically as the reason they stopped playing altogether despite otherwise enjoying the core loop. A paid DLC announced shortly after launch drew its own pointed, specific criticism from reviewers who felt the base game's systems weren't developed enough yet to justify asking players to buy additional content so soon, with more than one describing the timing as tone-deaf relative to the game's still-unresolved balance and stability issues.

Genuine signs of improvement, disputed by how much

It's worth noting a real, documented counter-current within the same review base: several reviewers specifically describe the developers shipping meaningful post-launch patches addressing the difficulty curve, reducing the meta-progression grind, and adding the ability to disable specific buildings from a run's random pool to give players more control over build variety. At least one detailed review explicitly revises an earlier negative impression upward after those changes, describing the game as "great" in its current, patched state. That improvement is real, but it isn't universally reflected in the wider review corpus yet — a meaningful number of detailed critical reviews, some written well after those patches shipped, still describe the same core complaints around shallow synergy and inconsistent difficulty, suggesting the patches have helped without fully resolving the underlying design concerns.

Value

At NZ$13.25, Monsters are Coming! sits at a fair price for a roguelite with this much genuine structural ambition, and the specific complaints about depth, difficulty tuning and stability are worth weighing carefully before buying rather than treated as launch-week noise, given how consistently and specifically they recur across a large review base. The Mostly Positive score — 2,277 positive against 570 negative across 2,847 reviews — reflects a genuinely divided reception rather than a uniformly enthusiastic one, split between players who find the moving-city premise and its harder difficulties rewarding on their own terms, and a larger, detailed group who feel the underlying systems needed considerably more development before asking players to invest the hours the genre demands. For players drawn specifically to a fresh premise and willing to accept real rough edges, or to check recent patch notes before buying, this is a reasonable pickup; for players wanting a fully realised, stable roguelite today, the review corpus makes a fair case for waiting.