YMMV / Siralim

• Demonic Spiders:
  • Elves. Strong monsters who specialize in shutting down a specific effect, they are especially terrifying in groups here they can completely shut down any of your teams' strategies.
  • Diabolic Hordes. They make themselves stronger when there are more Diabolic Hordes on their side, especially in regards to attack and health, so if you encounter a whole team of them you are going to have long and hard fight on your hands.
• Early Game Hell: All games start fairly roughly, you are unlikely to find monsters that have synergy with each other early on, and if you go through the layers too quickly you will get floored by overleveled monsters, forcing some grinding. 3 and Ultimate do help soften the blow, as the former gives you two starters and the latter's specializations guarantee you will have some abilities to help even the odds.
• Even Better Sequel: Each subsequent Siralim game is widely considered better than the one that came before it thanks to major additions to the gameplay and the overall quality raising.
• Game-Breaker: Some of the specializations in Ultimate are especially potent.
  • Bloodmage turns HP into a god-stat that affects attacks and spells, allowing creatures to become Damage Sponges who deal obscene amounts of damage.
  • Cabalist takes some prep and training, but play your cards right and all your monsters will be casting five spells at a time with several pages of spells to choose from.
  • Cleric gives you unmatched survivability, making your team almost unkillable whilst the enemy just gets more tired as it tries to kill you.
  • Necromancer allows you to get the most out of minions, basically giving you access to a perpetual army that devastates the enemy whilst making your own monsters stronger for every minion you have.
  • Pyromancer deals absurd amounts of damage and one of its perks makes it so enemies can’t revive, allowing it to break whole enemy strategies and certain boss fights.
  • Witch Doctor focuses on making the enemy fight themselves, get the right monsters on board to maximize effectiveness and the enemies will consistently end themselves turn one.
  • With the right combination of buffs, passive perks, equipment and party composition, an Animator's Animatus can single-handedly wipe out enemy groups in a single turn.
• Goddamned Bats
  • Royal Phoenixes in 1, and Dread Wights in 2 and 3. Every time these creatures are killed, they have a 50% chance to immediately revive themselves. This can lead to long chains of smacking the monster down repeatedly over and over and watching them get back up until they finally stay dead.
  • Certain Tremors in 3 have traits that give them a chance to block certain actions from being performed. While it's only 30%, frustrated players often find themselves unable to get an attack or spell off at all.
  • Ice Salamanders in 3, especially to high-level players who will generally be clearing battles in one or two moves. They endow their whole team with an ability to cast one of their spells automatically if they take more than 25% of their health in a single hit. Unfortunately, this means hitting their whole team with a powerful spell leads to a big chain of spells going off, slowing the game down and preventing the battle from being finished quickly. God help you if you used something that hit them multiple times each.
  • Sparktails in Ultimate, they specialize in countering damage and can one-shot a monster if you aren’t careful.
  • Nix Informers and Nix Scoundrels respectively silence and scorn your creatures for a turn at the beginning of the fight, and this is one of the many fusion traits creatures can have with realm instability. If your team is built for either of these and you encounter these traits, you’ll at best be annoyed for a turn and at worst be dead before you can really act.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • The Inquisitor specialization gained infamy for being one of, if not the, weakest specializations. It overall revolves around using healing magic to hurt the enemy, which is interesting but convoluted and inefficient in practice. Overtime buffs have helped it become much more useful, but it still gets outclassed by other specializations.
  • Reaver is another broadly disliked specialization. The specialization revolves around becoming stronger as the fight goes on, which isn’t hard to build around, but ensures that every fight is going go on for a long time. Reaver is infamously tedious to use as a result, and much like Inquisitor it gets outclassed by faster and more versatile specializations.
• That One Boss
  • Judgement and Mercy in 2. Judgement's ability is an HP to One attack that also grants him a free attack, and he will always go first, meaning that unless you have powerful barriers, at least one of your monsters is dead meat. Not only that, but unless you've done extensive grinding up to this point, the enemies are almost guaranteed to be faster than you, meaning your party can very well be wiped out before you even get a single turn.
  • The Undead Horde in 3 is generally considered the point at which the game stops giving you an easy time and drastically ramps up the difficulty. It is also the introduction of Horde battles, where the player must keep defeating monsters sequentially within a single battle until the reinforcements run out. It doesn't help that veteran players of the Siralim series will recognize several of the named monsters as citizens of Siralim's castle from 1 and 2, formerly helpful and friendly folks transformed against their will into horrible undead monstrosities.
  • Loid in Ultimate is the first real challenge you'll face, which can be a shock since he's only the third boss. His ability not only either scorns or silences your monsters depending on whether or not they directly attack or cast a spell, but also boosts his stats every time it goes off. Not only that, he's accompanied by Smog minions who will poison your entire party unless they're taken out immediately.
  • A few of the Gods in Ultimate, especially on higher difficulty ratings:
    • Apocranox casts a random arrow spell every time any creature's turn begins or ends. If you're lucky, only one or two of your creatures will be dead when you get your first turn. God help you if he ends up using Fragmenting Arrow on your squishiest team member or Disintegrating Arrow if you're running a Rebirth-based team.
    • Muse and her creatures always have all minions sans Illusion and cast Crucifixion at the beginning of each of their turns, meaning you're going to be dealing with a lot of painful passive damage, many debilitating debuffs, and counterattacks. Muse herself is pretty squishy, but trying to subdue her before your own party gets creamed can feel pretty luck-based.
    • T'mere M'rgo's team will copy-cast any spells and attacks that you manually perform. Yseros is the same... but will do it whether you meant to or not. Your creatures are back thanks to reviving spells? So are hers. Planning to buff your crew and debuff hers? She'll make sure everyone is on the same level. Forgot that you put that super strong all-enemy spell on one of your artifacts? Your team is probably dead. M'rgo can at least be dealt with in a few different ways, including using combinations of passively-used attacks and spells where their team won't copy them, but good luck building a sound strategy against Yseros.
• That One Level: The Kingdom of Heretics, realm of the god of war Gonfurian. It has large amount of annoying monsters including Centaurs (attacking extra times if they kill someone), Valkyries (countering attacks), Doom Guards (increasing his allies defense), and Diabolic Hordes (being stronger in the presence of other Diabolic Hordes).