Just got done playing Silent Call 2 for a few straight hours and I must say I quite enjoy it, except for a couple very minor issues I will get into later.
When you start a new game, your starting inventory is randomly generated, although your class influences what these random inventory items will be. The dungeons are randomly generated as well, save for ten static boss fights. SC2 has a static town, reminiscent of the classic ADOM, that serves as a hub with the usual things such as a guild hall for quests and a shop. The quests themselves are randomly generated, as is the inventory of the shop in town. The quests are color coded and you can pick the harder ones for a stiffer challenge if you so desire. The difficulty seems to be connected to the quest or level you're on instead of your character's level. Harder quests give better loot and your "boss progress meter" will increase by a larger amount upon completion of the quest.
Usage of an item known as a "Scroll of Wild Descent" will take you instantly deeper into the dungeon where tougher enemies await. Speaking of enemies, They are randomized as well and randomly placed throughout the different levels of the dungeon for your killing pleasure. The loot is random, both found and dropped by baddies, as is the stats or difficulty of each monster.
On to the presentation. Off the bat, I will tell you ASCII lovers that the graphics are tile based in this title, so if you prefer ASCII only......well you won't find that here. With that out of the way, For a tile based roguelike, SC2 is not bad at all graphically, relatively speaking in the context of the roguelike genre. Now these games have never been about whiz-bang-boom graphics by any stretch of the imagination, but I have one little complaint to make in this category. When you walk or attack there is no animation to speak of. Your character is a static picture. Now when I say "animation", I simply mean a 2-3 frames of animation to represent a strike, or legs that move back and forth to represent walking, nothing major of course. Perhaps this could be addressed in an update or a sequel? There are different effects though for hits and misses during combat, and decent animations for status ailments like poisoning and the like, so it is not totally devoid of "pop". Anyway, the interface is clean and you have varying levels of zoom if you like your tiles extra small, extra big, or somewhere in between. The maps fill in as you go, and have a neat "Indiana Jones" styled ancient wrinkled cloth look to them. The monsters you fight and characters you interact with are all clearly discernible, a bat looks like a bat, a troll looks like a troll etc.
Finally for the most important thing, gameplay. The movement and combat is of course turn-based in traditional roguelike fashion, each movement or action being counted as a turn. Though the interface may seem a bit obtuse at first, it becomes second nature quite quickly, and you forget about it entirely. The difficulty is completely in your hands, and as I stated earlier, you can delve deeper and/or accept harder quests to ramp up the challenge if you're feeling too strong. There are stats that are tracked like kills, etc. And when you die your character's progress on that run-through counts towards (level wise) to your next character upon creation. You do lose all your stuff when you die. And now we come to my other small complaint. I only wish for a "reset button" if you will. If I want to start clean with a level 1 character, I cannot do it, Well at least not through the game's interface. Perhaps this would not be a hard thing to implement? The more "hardcore" roguelike players would like that. There is a way however, to bypass that "feature". If you want to start clean you can just delete your game save off your Xbox 360 hdd. Viola! You now have a fresh game. It would be cool to be able to do it through the game itself though. Or maybe implement a "hardcore mode", where when you die that's it, no level retention, no nothing. Just a thought. Though, at any rate, the max character level is like 9999 and you can traverse a total of 9001 levels over the course of your character's life, so there is plenty of meat on it's bones.
Overall, I've had a pleasant experience with Silent Call 2, and recommend it to anyone looking for a solid roguelike on their Xbox 360, of which there are not many. Go pick it up on Xbox Live Indie Games section for only 80msp ($1 US).
