Monsters Are Coming! Rock and Road is hitting Xbox Game Pass for PC as the latest rogue-lite to hit the service. The selling point on this one is resource gathering! That’s right, you’ve got a mobile city trying to get to a safe destination, and your hero will chop wood and gather stones as it automatically wheels its way down the screen. It’s a fun concept with just enough content to keep things feeling fresh before they get too dull.
The Ark
As stated in the opener, Rock and Road (the entire name is so long…) is a top-down view title where a mobile city automatically journeys down the screen towards a safe new home. Monsters are indeed coming, ready to destroy your city and murder all of its inhabitants. To stop this, a hero, that’s you, will help clear the path of trees, rocks, and enemies as you attempt to complete the rogue-lite runs.
There’s a lot of bullet heaven/survivors-like in this title. Both you and your ever-growing city attack on a timer, with a bit of targeting needed by the player character. The city begins as a small grid with an automatically shooting tower. Your player has a hand axe that swings in a small arc in front of them. As each run progresses, you will earn experience points, with which you can build new structures around your city.
Every grid is some form of attacker, resource gainer, or passive buff for its neighboring districts. Unlocking new things to build and new weapons for your hero, alongside several long-term stat increases, is the rogue-lite part of the game. There are four biomes, of which you’ll be able to progress through various levels of difficulty.
The main goal of the game is to unlock and then rescue numerous different cities. Each has its own layout and passive buffs. Getting each to the Ark, at least on normal difficulty, wasn’t too difficult. The requirements to unlock certain cities are what took me the longest, by far, during this review period.
Some require you to chop down or mine a thousand total resources. Another wanted no more than 4 building types throughout an entire run. Some of these requirements, which can be matched by how the game’s difficulty system works, were my least favorite part of the game. I get why they wanted to promote different playstyles, but I just never found it that fun to be boxed in.
A Real Case of the Runs
The runs themselves in Monsters Are Coming! Rock and Road lasts anywhere from five to fifteen minutes. Each run nets you meta upgrade currency, which can be spent on things like faster resource gathering, more health for you or your city, and more. The runs themselves task you with protecting your automatically moving city through three major checkpoints.
Each checkpoint nets you a new weapon for your hero and offers up two challenge rooms. Those rooms can offer more resources or weapon upgrades for the hero. Checkpoints also contain a small amount of gold, which can be found in deposits throughout each run, and a shop in which to spend it.
The shop itself gives a varied selection of building types for your city. As you kill monsters and farm resources, you’ll get blue experience crystals. This is a bullet-heaven/survivors-like after all! Every time you fill the bar, you can choose one of three building types to add to your city. Some benefit certain types around them, and learning how to place each building is key to completing runs successfully.
The final dash from checkpoint 3 to the Ark sees you fight against a boss, some with damned clever mechanics. There is more to the runs and their progression, but I feel it’s best to leave those surprises in case you’re interested in playing.
The game doesn’t take too long to let you unlock most of the building and weapon types. That meant that runs never felt overly similar as I progressed through everything. Both your hero and your city have health pools. If the city dies, the game is over, so you’ll need to mine rock, which can heal it.
If your player character dies, you’ll lose a building spot to their memorial and instantly respawn. Any resources you were carrying will be left as a backpack in the world, which you can attempt to recover if possible. In early difficulties, the road is generally clear, with little in the way of your city. This changes quickly as you attempt harder difficulties.
The objective of each run changes as well, with hard requirements like having 500g in the bank by the time you complete, and more. These challenges were fun to start with, but their difficulty picked up so much over time that it dominated the way I played the game.
By the end of my playthrough, I felt like I had little control over my playstyle if I wanted to progress. To upgrade the speed at which your city attacks, you’ll farm wood. One difficulty was reaching wood level 50 by the end of the run, which meant all I could do was chop down trees the entire time.
At launch, the game will only be on PC to start. It will release on consoles in 2026. Playing on my PC and the Xbox Ally X, where much of the footage for the video review was taken, it looks and runs fine. It is a tiny install, not even 500mb large. The city grids, enemies, hero, and biomes are detailed enough, though not that varied.
Sound-wise, a key for the genre, it has one great song and a few decent ones. I found myself playing on the first stage as often as I could because of how much I liked the music there. The sound effects were low in the mix by default, so depending on the full release, you may want to go in and up them to match the music’s volume level.
Finally, and it’s a nice thing to get to say once again, I ran into no bugs while playing. The only issue I had was a lack of Cloud Sync on Steam, a couple of times biting me in the butt. That’s a platform issue, though, and not one tied to this game.
Wrapping Things Up
Monsters Are Coming! Rock and Road is a solid addition to the never-ending bullet-heaven/rogue-lite/survivors-like (yeesh) genre. It looks nice, plays well, and has at least one bopping track to help carry it through a series of runs that are only let down by some punitive progression requirements.
Monsters Are Coming! Rock and Road
Played on
PC via Steam
PROS
- Interesting Concept
- Solid Progression Paths
- One Really Good Song
CONS
- Some Weak Songs
- Overly Restrictive Progression Requirements
