Siralim 2

Siralim 2 is a dungeon-crawler based on randomness and quantity. Basically, what has been done is that hundreds of monsters, items, spells, and other such bits have been created, most have been given some forms of random enhancements and allow for combinations between them to create a near-infinite amount of combinations. Throw these things into dungeons, allow the player the capture and find them, then create challenges that the player has to try to overcome by assembling a proper team.
And this sounds real fine on paper for me. I'm a huge fan of generated content, combinations and synergies, and the emergent gameplay that could and should arise from that. However, I found my time with it to be incredibly tedious.

I'd like to start off with criticizing the control scheme and looks of the game. Rather uncharacteristic of me, as I absolutely love, for example, Dwarf Fortress, which is rather guilty of both of these things.
An easy problem to see is that the game is played with just 6 keys - WASD, select, and back. While it means there's no difficulty in learning the controls, it's quite hindering to get around the menus. And this game requires a metric ton of navigating menus. Mouse selection or keyboard shortcuts instead of clicking S 10 times followed by W 10 times soon afterwards would be really, really nice. if you're going for a keyboard-only control scheme, make it very well optimized. This one is not.
As for the graphics, they're simply charring. While that doesn't really hurt the gameplay, I just dislike looking at them most of the time. I wouldn't complain about graphics that aren't good and don't try to be, but I do complain if they're trying to be more than the author was capable of. Also there's recurring problems with the pixels getting very un-square if any of the viewport settings are just slightly off the default. It's hard to explain, but it looks really bad.

As for the gameplay, I find it to be too much of a grindfest. The huge amount of randomization is good for keeping things somewhat fresh for however long you want to play, or for collection enthusiasts, so if you've got 1000 hours to burn, and just want to do something, it can be a nice time waster. However, if you're like me and desire quality over quantity, then all this nigh-infinite content doesn't matter, since it's not enjoyable enough.
You're allowed to advance at your own pace for the most part, but you can't just rush through everything since you're not strong enough. Grind away at lower floors for as long as you want and you should eventually win one way or the other. I personally would prefer the perfectionist approach, where I take my time to explore everything and look through all the possibilities, but the game throws so much stuff at me all the time, that looking through all my spells, all my equipment, all my monsters is infeasible.
And these describe the two alternative paths through which you should be able to play the game, as well as the problems with them. Either grind or think of the right combinations to get really strong. But grinding is boring button mashing, and thinking takes too long, not because it's difficult but because there's too many things.

Overall, this game may very well be enjoyable to those to whom these things do not sound so bad. It's not very popular, but it is quite highly rated on Steam, meaning the few people who play it, like it. But unless you can go look at what the game is and think to yourself that "yes, this is exactly what I've been looking for", it's not going to be enjoyable. For the record, there's also a third game out in Early Access right now. Much like with the first game, it's mostly just more of the same, but with a few differences, as far as I understand. No major revamps to any game systems or graphics.

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