Hey there, demons. It’s me, ya boy. I’m writing a review that combines two things that I absolutely do not enjoy at all, pocket monsters that evolve with experience and tower defense. To say that I’m not a fan of tower defense would be putting it lightly, as I hard quit Assassin’s Creed Revelations over it, despite being a massive fan of the series at the time.
I’ve also been quoted on the record far too many times saying that Pokemon is just the same game revamped every few years for a quick buck, so to say that I was cynical going into Rogue Monster Rush would be an understatement; but I hate to admit that I enjoy roguelikes, so this thing caught my attention. Does Rogue Monster Rush mashup the formula enough to get our seal of approval? Find out in our Rogue Monster Rush review!
Rogue Monster Rush
Developer: Ghost Vibes
Publisher: Ghost Vibes
Platforms: Windows (reviewed)
Release Date: March 7, 2026
Price: $11.99
Admittedly, I would have never given this game a fair shot based on first glance alone. It showed up offered to us on Steam Curator and I was just about to ignore it but I saw roguelike in the description and upon watching the trailer, the Ghost Vibes logo caught my attention.
It looked strangely familiar to me, so after seeing Dave Oshry shamelessly shill for this game on Twitter I did some research and found out that this studio was co-founded by Mike Gaboury, of Filthy Casual clothing fame. Okay, bet. Let’s see what you got, as most of these guys are in that space are pretty creative.
Rogue Monster Rush has just enough roguelike to scratch that itch of “just one more run”, while being simple enough to pick up and play that even cynical jerks like me can enjoy it. The premise is pretty simple, you start a level and each round you have to deploy a new tile that expands the play space.
Eventually you’ll either build your play area to reach the boss chamber and this will launch the boss at your base, beginning the end of the battle. If you can’t make the road, the boss will spawn with the normal portals on wave 20, so there’s some strategic benefit to bottlenecking and beelining to the boss island.
As this is a tower defense game, your units are cute little monsters that are totally not inspired by any Japanese franchises that have anything to do with collecting or catching anything of any variety. You start off by throwing down some Sproudens, which reminded me a bit of the Peashooter from Plants vs Zombies.
Eventually, you’ll upgrade each unit as the game progresses, and each upgrade evolves their look as well as their range and strength. Eventually, you’ll unlock enough stars to max all their skills out, and you can then cash in those upgrades to prestige, which allows you to add more stats to their passive skills.
Finishing a level adds experience to your Hatchery, which basically levels up an Egg that you can open after you complete a match or two. You’ll either unlock new monsters that you can throw onto your team.
The monsters range from things like an angel that buffs your nearby units, or a snake that spits poison to ensure low health enemies don’t blow past you. Personally, I like to make a majority of my units target the strongest units, and then set my supports to go after low health units or units that have higher movement speed in order to attempt to prevent an enemy from sneaking through while I was zoomed out and looking at the other side of the map.
There are also active player skills that you can unlock that will help you deal with the active threats. There’s a skill that slows all units in an area called Temporal Flux, while you can also choose to rain meteors or lightning strikes for additional damage capacity.
Need some defense? There’s a skill that allows you to temporarily shield your base so that it can tank a few extra hits while your units do some clean up or you hope your other skills come off cooldown.
My favorite was the completely unexpected Chaingun skill that allows you to choose a point on the map and then throws you into the seat of an active turret in first person mode that allows you to mow down robots as they come running down the lanes at you. It rules so hard.
As the levels progress, you’ll unlock a booster after every few rounds. This will allow you to choose an upgrade for each of your available units, and this allows you to gamble with your gold to try and get legendary or mythical upgrades for your preferred units.
If your luck is good, you can absolutely hilariously break the game by upgrading some of these units to the point where they can kill a level boss in less than five hits.
You’ll also be able to use your stars to upgrade not only your spells, your monsters, and your base and its passive upgrades as well. Putting some gold into economy helped me quickly compound some nice interest and I was able to keep up without having to sell units very often.
You could also choose to increase the likelyhood of power crystal spawns or splash damage barrels that can be clicked on in order to inflict damage on enemies that pass by them in the lane.
Ultimately, I can’t believe I’ve found myself enjoying a tower defense game for the first time in probably ten years, but this game is just fun enough to keep me coming back, even if there’s not very much content right now.
As it stands, there’s only ten monsters and four levels to play through, which isn’t too bad for a game that just came out of early access. I haven’t enjoyed a game that I got on sale for five dollars this much in a few years, and I’ll be patiently watching as development continues.
Rogue Monster Rush is proof that sometimes an unassuming title being recommended to you by Steam can sometimes be real gem in the wild. Well done, Ghost Vibes.
Rogue Monster Rush was reviewed on PC using a code provided by Ghost Vibes via Steam Curator. Additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy is here. Rogue Monster Rush is now available for Windows PC (via Steam).
