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Montabi Review
- Jordan Wood
- 45 minutes ago
- 6 min read
If you asked me to name a genre that, in 2026, might be the hardest for a new game to stand out in, I think I'd probably pick "roguelike deckbuilder" without a second thought. According to SteamDB, over 400 games with that specific combination of tags have been released this year alone. If you spend a few minutes clicking around in that subgenre, you'll get a sense for how crowded the field has gotten with how strangely — almost maniacally — specific the implementations are.
There's Vampire Crawlers, of course — a game from the Vampire Survivors folks that turns old-school first-person dungeon crawling into a combo-beast card game. Then there's Gambonanza, which updates the Balatro formula by swapping chess in for poker. There's even a sci-fi train game called Fogpiercer that emphasizes positioning and lets you attach different cars to your locomotive for various effects.
In a world where discoverability is the buzzword on every industry analyst's lips, making a game in such an overcrowded genre is tough sledding.
But that's exactly the challenge Jakarta-based devs Mankibo have set for themselves with their new release, Montabi, and the wrinkle they've added to the recipe is a slightly less overserved microgenre on top of the rest: monster collector. Oh, and it’s a tactics game too. There's a lot going on here.
Publisher: Mankibo Developer: Akupara Games Platform: Played on PC (Steam) Availability: Released on August 6, 2026 on PC (Steam) |
At first glance, Montabi is a beautifully drawn, brightly colored adventure promising you all kinds of monster-collecting fun as you guide one of three trainers across three stages, recruiting a bunch of cute-yet-vicious creatures as you go. Quickly, however, Montabi materializes some pretty nifty tricks from its sleeves. First, instead of combat taking place in the classic turn-based JRPG style, they play out as a tactics fight across two 3x3 grids, with your units occupying the spaces on the left, and your opponent’s units occupying the spaces on the right.
Second, rather than select from a menu of attacks and abilities like a traditional JRPG, each of your units comes with their own deck of skills, with each deck specializing in one or two tactical approaches. Some of your Montabi supercharge their attacks by flying across the battlefield every turn, while others may build up stacks and stacks of armor until they spend them all like currency in a massive attack.
The result of this mechanical menagerie is a game where the creature collecting quickly feels a little like set dressing for Montabi's real interests — the mind-bending blend of deck crafting and traditional tactics. The complexity ramps up quickly, and as cuddly as Montabi seems, it's a genuine challenge to clock everything that’s going on, especially in its first few hours. Because each montabi has its own deck of skills, the game can at first feel like an explosion of possibilities that are a struggle just to keep up with.
the bright, colorful aesthetic masks an information dense UI, full of tough tactical decisions.
Once you're midway through a run, you'll likely have filled your roster with six different montabi, each with a deck full of its own unique cards and combos. Add in the surprisingly tricky positioning that the game's villains force you to navigate on the battlefield, and the three unique trainers whose decks bring their own unifying archetypes to how your units work together and, well, it turns out Montabi is a lot less approachable than its Saturday morning cartoon vibe makes it seem.
It's a good thing then that, for the most part, Montabi feels absolutely dynamite to play.
A good deckbuilder lives or dies on the sensation of its synergies, and each creature's deck is tuned to give you that good dopamine hit as many times as possible on every run. Most deckbuilders do this by forcing you to commit to one strategy or another as you craft your deck. The player who hops along too many bunny trails en route to the end is never going to find success: commit to the bleed or the churn or the armor counters, and you'll fare much better than spreading your card selections across every shiny new strategy that presents itself.
Montabi, on the other hand, asks the beautiful question, "why choose?" With each new creature in your collection representing a completely independent deck, your strategies bloom across dozens of different vectors, shifting much of your strategy to a meta decision layer where you aren't just looking for synergies within decks, but across them.
Then, once you've brought your team to the battlefield, the grid presents you with new puzzles. Attacks generally come in three varieties. There are melee attacks, which attack the enemy who is in the closest column to your unit, so long as they are within 3 columns. There are ranged attacks, which target the first enemy unit that shares a row with yours; then there are targeted attacks which might hit anyone at all on the opposing side.
Montabi, on the other hand, asks the beautiful question, "why choose?" With each new creature in your collection representing a completely independent deck, your strategies bloom across dozens of different vectors, shifting much of your strategy to a meta decision layer where you aren't just looking for synergies within decks, but across them.
Some of these attacks can be modulated to be area of effect, and then there are the traps and mines you can throw out there, as well as abilities that shift your opponents from one space to another. The game offers a preview of what your opponents will do on their next move, so it's up to you to play your cards right, minimizing the damage to your squad by positioning them correctly, while maximizing their damage output in turn.
It's important to note that your units don't take their turns individually either, so when it's your go, you're going to be playing the hands for all three of your active units at once, even switching between hands on the fly as you chain your combos just right. I've had turns that felt absolutely magical, swapping off between units as I play 10, 15, 25, or more cards like a deckbuilding maniac, never giving my opponents a chance to blink.
That said, even when everything is clicking, Montabi still presents a mighty challenge. On the middle difficulty that I used, the units you'll face often have much more health than yours, and the AI is cleverer in their tactics than I expected. The bosses are as varied as they are deadly - more than a few times I found myself scraping just barely by, pressing my units to the edge on a final win-or-die gambit. The game makes you earn your wins, and punishes you for inattentive builds or poorly composed teams.
Where Montabi lets itself down, unfortunately, is in the roguelike elements which feel needlessly opaque and at times perfunctory. While there's a helpful encyclopedia in the main menu cataloguing every new item, charm, boss, and creature you collect, as well as a slightly hidden but mightily helpful card library for each unit you've unlocked, it still feels difficult to track exactly what new unlockables you're making progress toward between the runs. It's been a while since I've played a roguelike where the rogue aspects felt this vestigial, this detached from the main pleasures the game itself is offering. I could tell I was getting better with each new run, but if you asked me what was contributing, exactly, to that growing success, I don't think I'd have known what to tell you.
The actual maps you're traversing are almost entirely static as well, with each new run only presenting a slight rearrangement of the main locations from the last. And while the world itself is vibrant and cheery in its presentation, the narrative's impact and worldbuilding are incredibly slight. Without a clear power arc to boast of or a lovable world that feels worth exploring, the rock-solid core systems are left a little stranded. As a result, though there is an ending you can work toward, Montabi feels a little bit like a game you kind of play until you don't.
Still, even without the trappings of a worthy roguelike loop, Montabi is a compelling debut from Mankibo. After playing it, I feel convinced that despite the crowded market, this game deserves to find an audience all its own. While the maximalist, chuck-everything-in-the-pot approach to design doesn't always flatter the games it produces, in this case, Mankibo has threaded the needle to make something that is competent in its worst moments and very nearly great in its best.
Verdict  |
Image Credits: Mankibo
Disclaimer: We received a free copy of this game from the publisher.
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