Monsters are Coming! Rock & Road Review: Traffic Jammed

Rocky Roadtrip

Since October, I’ve been going through a bit of a roguelite phase. Vampire Survivors finally added online co-op, allowing us to all play together, while Megabonk, Ball x Pit, and to a certain extent, Hades II collectively took hundreds of hours away from me. That’s why, when Monsters are Coming! Rock & Road released, I couldn’t help but pick it up. On paper, it has everything I’ve been looking for: the overall gameplay of a survivor-like combined with tower defense mechanics. For the most part, the tower defense genre has never become immensely popular, which is why we’ve seen few innovations in that space. As someone who spent much of the early 2000s playing custom tower defense maps in Warcraft III, I always look forward to anything with proper tower defense mechanics. Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap sort of scratched that itch earlier this year, but generally, there isn’t too much to look forward to if you’re a tower defense fan.

Unfortunately, the tower defense portion of Monsters are Coming! Rock & Road is a letdown. While there’s a large variety of towers and some interesting synergies to explore, you’ll often find yourself picking the best of the available options. That’s mainly because there’s no focus on mazing enemies, and the limited building area also constrains any sort of experimentation. A good reason why tower defense games feel so engaging is the level of creativity involved in deciding when you want to slow an enemy, which areas you want to focus on for AoE, and so on. Successfully creating a kill box is one of the best parts of a tower defense game, and sadly, that’s entirely missing in Monsters are Coming! Rock & Road.

Funnel Vision

The core gameplay loop in Monsters are Coming! Rock & Road is pretty easy to understand if you’ve played any survivor-like game, especially Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor. In Monsters are Coming! Rock & Road, you control a hero who can equip up to four weapons, while the town hall where you place your towers moves on its own. Your hero automatically attacks and harvests when there are enemies, trees, or rocks nearby. The goal of the game is to gather up XP in order to level your town hall, wood to increase your towers’ attack speed, and stone to repair your town hall. Anything you collect on your hero must be deposited onto the town hall, so it’s a bit of running around, collecting things, and dropping them off. There’s a limited number of items you can bring back with your hero, resulting in this frantic back and forth style of gameplay.

Once you get into a rhythm, you’ll find yourself spending time helping kill enemies that are near your town hall, while bringing back as much wood and stone as you can. Extra stone can be stockpiled to be used automatically for repairs whenever your town hall takes damage. Each time you level up your town hall, you’ll get an option to choose one new tower to add. Meanwhile, hero upgrades come in the form of chests, which can be found on the trail and at checkpoints on your run. The chests found on the trail offer an upgrade for one of your hero’s weapons, while the chests at each checkpoint unlock an additional weapon for the hero. Initially, these weapon upgrades are pretty basic, letting you choose from more attack, speed (cooldown reduction), and size. Later on, the game does add some more engaging and interactive weapons, such as a dagger that creates a minion on a kill, but their upgrades are never very complex.

Horde D’oeuvres

While the core gameplay loop is pretty engaging and fun, the meta progression is where some of the design flaws start to appear. Each run earns you compasses, which are the currency needed to add permanent upgrades to your town hall and your hero. Many of these upgrades are standard fare, such as more base damage, faster attack speed, better defenses, more minion damage, more carrying capacity, faster movement speed, etc. Again, you won’t put much thought into which ones you invest in based on your playstyle, but this is also very similar to what you find in other survivor-like games.

Where things get a bit frustrating are the unlocks for new towers and towns. Some of these unlocks have very specific requirements, which can be difficult to meet because of RNG. For the most part, you’re better off just playing and enjoying the game instead of targeting specific unlocks, as many of them will just happen on their own or you’ll stumble into them randomly. The super specific ones will require several attempts unless you get really lucky. The reason why it’s so difficult for some of these is that Monsters are Coming! Rock & Road didn’t have any ban or skip systems in place when it first launched. I wasn’t able to prevent certain unlocked towers from appearing in the selection pool, nor was I able to skip or ban a selection within a run. This forced me to make a choice each time my town hall leveled, and if I ran out of gold from rerolling, I had to select something I didn’t necessarily want. Thankfully, this changed on November 27 with patch 1.0.10.0, which added pick and banish to the collection, helping make runs more consistent.

Arkitect Problems

Things eventually get interesting enough when you can access all of the different town halls. What’s befuddling is that many of the town halls are cleverly designed with some interesting mechanics, some of which will cause you to play the game differently. For example, one of my personal favorites sees the town hall leveling through lumber donations rather than typical blue XP gems. This allows you to focus on gathering lumber rather than running around and collecting XP. Lumber also increases the attack speed of your towers, so you find yourself scaling rather quickly. I really wish some of that design spilled over to the hero’s weapons and upgrades.

In terms of towers, there’s a wide variety of options, possibly too many. You have your pretty standard towers like fire and ice, along with several options for towers that spawn different types of minions. The more interesting buildings are the ones that produce currency and resources, while others serve as passive buffs to certain types of attacks. Connecting some of these buildings will strengthen their effect, essentially creating a neighborhood of sorts. There are some synergies that can result in builds that make you feel like you broke the game, but they’re really rare because of how many different options there are. Sometimes it’s really frustrating rerolling over and over, hoping to get what you need and never seeing it.

Hoard Mode

When it comes to difficulty, there are multiple tiers that unlock once you complete each one. The jump from Normal to Hard was steep when the game first launched, but it has since been patched to make the harder difficulties more manageable. Ultimately, though, you’ll need good progress toward your meta progression in order to clear those modes. Personally, once I managed to unlock everything that’s available in the collection, I found little reason to do more runs. However, it has been great to see developer Ludogram act quickly on the game’s feedback and address many players’ concerns, and I’m hopeful the game will continue to improve.

Each run takes around 10 to 15 minutes to complete, depending on how long you take to make your choices. There are also instances where your town hall can get stuck on the trail if something gets in its way, so you’ll have to clear it before it can continue moving. Visually, I actually really like the art style of the game. It’s subtle and unique, but it can get a bit chaotic, making it difficult to see certain boss mechanics because the underlying red circle gets covered. The good news is, if your hero dies, it’s not much of a penalty. You’re just forced to place a tombstone down at your town hall, which takes up one spot that could have gone to a tower. Currently, there are four different maps to conquer, each with its own different biome.

Gated Community

Overall, three of us separately enjoyed our time with Monsters are Coming! Rock & Road, but we all had the same impression that the game is a little shallow and it just feels like “something” is missing. That something is a bit hard to explain, because it’s basically a magical combination that successful roguelites manage to nail, making those games very addicting. It’s partly compelling options for the player to choose from, and partly the strong sense of progression throughout each run. Every now and then, you want the player to feel as if they broke the game, and those occurrences are very rare with Monsters are Coming! Rock & Road. Most runs feel just fine, and I think that might be the biggest issue with the game. Seldom do you get that sense of satisfaction when you reach the end of a run, where you either want to refine your build or replicate it.

I’m looking forward to seeing the level of depth that developer Ludogram plans to add to the game, or whether the intention is to keep it more casual-friendly with the more basic weapons, towers, and upgrades. Still, for $8.99, if any part of the gameplay loop speaks to you, it’s worth a playthrough. I particularly enjoyed doing runs on my ROG Xbox Ally X, where it performed well. If you liked Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, you’ll probably enjoy this game, since it basically adds to that formula. If you’re mainly looking for a strategic tower defense game, though, this won’t be terribly satisfying.

Monsters are Coming! Rock & Road has an official release date of November 20, 2025, for Xbox Series X|S and PC. This review is based on a purchased retail copy of the game on PC. While FullCleared does have affiliate partnerships, they do not influence our editorial content. We may earn a commission for purchases made through links on this page.

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