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The promise of an endless game is, in theory, compelling. Who wouldn't want to have a game they can play forever? In the most perfunctory way possible, Siralim can claim this as a success. It acts as a perfect mobile game, one that can be picked up and dropped in the blink of an eye, where returning to it is no challenge whatsoever. However, it's also a game that shows that a game supplying 'endless' content is a difficult one to pull off.

Siralim is dungeon-crawling RPG where the player collects the souls of defeated monsters to form a party to fight more monsters. The game gets its name from the castle it takes place in, a vast structure solely focused on monster fighting and creation. As the ruler of the castle, the task of keeping the kingdom safe from the monsters that plague its many realms is the main goal. This is the closest thing the game has to a story and from this point on the player is free to play as they see fit. There are a series of quests that direct the player through the different mechanics and concepts that make up the game, but after that the player is left to their own devices.

After creating the ruler — which really comes down to a choice between the Chaos, Death, Life, Nature, and Sorcery schools of magic, which affects the available perks, the starting creature, and gives a small power boost to that class of spells — players take control right away. As the castle has no front doors, the king or queen enters various realms through a Teleportation Shrine. The realms are made up of floors, each one littered with roaming packs of monsters and useful components. On each floor the player is given a duty, usually in the form of a substandard MMO quest that asks for X amount of Y, that gives players a little bit of direction on the floor, but often times this usually involves clearing the floor until the requirements are met. There are different realms to explore based on the five schools of magic in the game, but the only differences between them are the tileset and what random things are found strewn about the place. Initially, only one realm is available while access to the others must be built in the castle's war room.

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The war room serves as a place to upgrade the castle, from adding new rooms to improving existing rooms. Each of these rooms introduce another system, like the blacksmith who can forge new weapons and improve stats on existing ones and the enchanter who can add abilities to equipment. Siralim does provide guidance through the construction of most of these rooms, though those quests seemed to arbitrarily stop after a seemingly random point, giving the impression that the quest progression may be bugged to some extent.

But missing out on the main quests doesn't interrupt the bulk of the game, which is raising and fighting creatures. Players can build up teams of up to six creatures — which humorously follow in single file — as they travel through the realms. Each type of creature has one unique ability and can equip a single item. These abilities start off fairly basic but become more interesting as more creatures are unlocked. While summoning additional creatures to form parties with, pieces begin to fall into place and strategies begin to present themselves based off ability interaction and creature placement, making team-construction the most interesting aspect of the game, especially once Nether Creatues come into play. Nether creatures are more powerful versions of creatures that require a lot of time and effort into creating but come equipped with a second ability and increased stats. Combined with abilities gained from items and some interesting interplay between creatures becomes the main drive of the game.

In theory, these would carry over to make combat more interesting, but that unfortunately is not the case. Combat is horribly slow, incessantly repetitve, and surprisingly lacking interaction. Creatures have the option to attack a target, defend for the turn, or provoke enemy creatures which lowers defense as well. Enemy creatures share the same functions which ensures that ninety percent of all actions in any given combat are just basic attacks, albeit modified by various abilities. Since the party is fully healed after each battle, fights become a DPS race and offensive play is all that matters. A single defensive creature provoking every turn will keep the heavy hitters nice and healthy. The only time this deviates is with spells, which usually eats up the active creature's turn but gives the player some ability to react to combat. However, equipped spells are quite limited in uses and can only be recharged by randomly dropped items, making their use in combat sparing at best.

These aspects would normally make for dull combat, but other elements that come into play make the game less fun to play than it should be. For example, while enemy monsters can be seen while exploring, the rest only appear once combat has started. Without the ability to use consumable items or change equipment mid-battle, the player cannot adjust strategies to match the new enemies. This makes it impossible to try and prepare for fights ahead of time, forcing a greater reliance on high-damaging creatures. Certain status ailments and abilities can also pop up that seem to serve no purpose in a fight than to drag it out. Every status ailment and its effects get listed for each creature every turn even though the information is clearly displayed on its portrait. The game also slows to a noticeable crawl when those status effects begin to stack, making battles take even longer. The only time combat takes on a different dynamic is in the Arena, a late game wing of the castle where the player fights enemy parties until he or she fails, but with the added change of not healing in between battles.

It's during these prolonged battles that Siralim shows that the majority of its core game is comprised of busywork and nothing happens organically. Numerous upgrades to the castle and to certain items require rituals, which are fulfilled by gaining energy from defeating creatures. There are five different resources in the game that are collected from creatures and from exploring realms. Without investing Royalty Points, skill points earned when the player levels up, these will come slowly and serve to block progress. With a good chunk of invested points these resources become a non-issue, but all that time and effort that could have gone into specializing the player character or the creatures has now been spent making the flow of the game more bearable. New creatures do not become available the further along the player gets in the dungeon; they're an upgrade from the war room. The various realms don't have specific creatures tied to them; creatures just appear at random. Without investing in additional ritual slots, only one ritual can be active at a time. The Arena offers a change of pace, but an invitation is needed to enter. Invitations are gained at random while exploring dungeons or can be bought with rewarded Arena points, but why enforce a limitation at all?

Enjoyment of Siralim seems highly dependent on how much grind and padding one would be able to handle. The presentation is basic, highly unanimated but endearing in a retro sort of way. Music is serviceable but the soundtrack is too slim and repetitive to rise above that. The Vita version of the game also had a tendency to crash every few hours. The game has a save anywhere function, so this wasn't too big of deal, just enough to condition saving frequently. There is a kernel of a good idea that lies at that heart of Siralim, but it's buried under so many levels of bloat and filler. In the time it takes to get to the interesting bits, it simply becomes not worth the time investment. What could have been an pleasing time-waster ends up ultimately feeling like eighty hours wasted. There are better games to invest this amount of time in, and Siralim isn't worth it.

Review by Matt S.If you’re going to make a sequel to a game, make sure it’s an actual sequel. I really loved the original Siralim. It tickled my nostalgic itch with its ridiculous menu system, super old-school character design, and commitment to roguelike difficulty. It was a game that would continue to reward you no matter how long you actually played it for, and it is a hidden gem on console and PC for people to people who played games back in the 80s and 90s to discover and delight in.Why Thylacine Studios felt it was appropriate to build a sequel to Siralim, I’m not entirely sure.

This “new” game, Siralim 2, doesn’t actually do anything differently from its predecessor, rendering one or the other effectively redundant. There’s simply no reason to play both, and as I was playing I couldn’t help but wish that the developer had taken the success of the first and used it to do something meaningful.There are any number of ways Thylacine could have gone. A wireframe dungeon crawler in the vein of the old Wizardry games would have allowed the developer to reuse the same monster assets, and keep many of the same combat systems, while giving players something fresh in changing the perspective from Siralim’s original top-down roguelike perspective. Or another alternative would have been to keep the same gameplay and perspective, but switch up the art, taking things from the 8-bit tiles of the original Siralim and giving players Super Nintendo-style 16-big graphics. That way retro fans could have played along with the “generational jump effect,” as though they were rediscovering a forgotten series from yesteryear. Siralim's combat system is delightful.— Matt @ DDNet (@DigitallyDownld)But instead Siralim 2 gives players the exact same game as its predecessor, just with a bit more stuff to collect and do. Sadly the original game wasn’t exactly lacking for “stuff”, so the work done in adding more to it just comes across as bloat.Siralim is a monster-collecting game in the vein of Pokemon.

Players explore dungeons, encounter enemies, and then aim to extract “cores” from those enemies that they can take back to home base and use to summon replicas of those creatures to fight on their side. Then they can equip those monsters will skills and artefacts, before plunging back into the dungeon to level them up and look for even more creatures.Because the game’s levels are randomised, and endless, this loop needed to be addictive, because it’s all the game’s got, and it is very addictive indeed. The menus in the game will intimidate at first, because there is so many of them, and just like the games of old, some of the most important menus are buried deep within this unwieldy interface. But, once you’ve got the hang of it, That unwieldy interface becomes the starting point to a great deal of depth, and customising your party and monsters is something that you’ll play at for hours, trying to figure out the best possible combination of characters and abilities. And, with over 500 monsters to recruit, spread across numerous (again, endless) worlds, you’re going to be spending an awful lot of time in Siralim 2, if you let it get its claws into you.

The worlds in the game are also filled with subquests, from tracking down treasure to answering the riddles of dwarves and appeasing gods. There is more of this stuff than in the previous title, giving you a reason to properly explore each dungeon level, which is welcomed, though even with this, the nature of randomisation means that you’ll quickly start to come across the same things over and over again, and eventually these can become an irritant in the way of the basic monster collecting and levelling loops.As with the first game, there’s barely a thread of the plot holding Siralim 2 together.

On the one hand that’s fine, because again a narrative might distract away from the basic play loops, but on the other it’s yet another area where the game fails to differentiate itself from its predecessor. If Siralim 2 had have taken the original gameplay structures and overlaid a plot with some depth over it, then that would have been a reason to check the new game out, even if we weren’t looking at something that would inspire Shakespeare. As it is, thanks to a streamlining of the base hub, where there are even fewer NPCs to talk to than in the previous game, the narrative elements of Sirilim 2 are even softer.None of this matters if you haven’t played the original game, of course. Buy Siralim 2, and if you’ve got any appreciation for old-school difficulty, art, and presentation, you’ll love the way that the game adheres so closely to tradition. Without any narrative context, or indeed an “end” as such, you may, over the longer term, feel like playing the game is fundamentally pointless, and while that’s true, it’s also the kind of game you can pick and play for half an hour here and there as an indulgence in between other games, without feeling like you need to commit to a time-consuming RPG in one great big block. I’m still playing the original Siralim over a year after playing the first, and it’s precisely because it doesn’t pressure me into “completing” anything that I find myself coming back to it when I’ve got some time to kill.

But if you have played the original Siralim, the impression that the game is unnecessary will be overwhelming. Siralim 2 simply does nothing substantial to build on the foundations of its predecessor.

It’s very much like those sports games that simply update the roster of players without actually changing the game in any way from one year to the next except that sports games developers don’t really do that any more. I want to see more Siralim, but if there’s to be a Siralim 3, I do want it to be something different this time.