The thing that immediately stands out when roaming derelict buildings and creepy aqueducts in AI Limit is just how stylish and crisp everything looks, and as it turns out, that killer presentation goes quite a long way. Sure, it’s yet another soulslike with the same old bonfire checkpointing system, punishing combat encounters, and super gross bosses that really need to take a chill pill, but I’ve gotta admit, the anime-inspired, sleek and cartoonish art style really won me over, and I could see this becoming my next sweaty fascination – y’know, maybe as a nice chaser in between Shadow of the Erdtree sessions.
Like countless genre peers, AI Limit makes no apologies about its inspiration; this is a soulslike through and through. You’ll gather materials from fallen enemies to spend on stat upgrades, find weapons and equipment in every monster-filled corridor to customize your fighting style and abilities, and, of course, die a whole heck of a lot when some tanky boss with serious anger management issues uses your face as a doormat. Classic soulslike stuff!
And at least in the hour-long demo I played, AI Limit seems content to follow that blueprint to a tee, offering pretty much no novel tweaks on the formula or reasons to play this one over the piles of games like it. With one notable exception, that is: the endlessly impressive and hard to look away from art style.
That might not sound like enough of a differentiator to keep one’s interest, and yet I found it to be the primary reason I was so eager to claw my way through each deadly zone to see what awesome-looking thing awaited me in the next area. In the same way the Persona series follows the traditional JRPG playbook very closely but sets itself apart by oozing style and unrivaled swagger, AI Limit really did stand out to me in many of those same ways. Whether it was the sleek and interesting UI or combat animations that made me feel like I was the main character in an action-packed anime as I cut down the enemy with ease, I found myself nodding my head in appreciation even when every other aspect was fairly by the numbers.
I will say though, it’s a bit surprising that, despite all the style AI Limit has going for it, the protagonist, at least in the demo, is woefully inexpressive. With no dialogue and a deadpan look on her face at all times, there’s not much beyond some neat looking outfits and sweet combat animations for me to go on. She doesn’t even make any kind of noise when she takes damage or dies, which just feels odd. I mean, I get that this lady’s supposed to be a robot, but why even give her a human appearance if you aren’t going to give her any humanity? Here’s hoping these details merely didn’t make it into this early build of the game.
The demo confined me to an early area that seemed pretty clearly intended as an introductory tutorial zone, but even so I managed to find some new weapons to try out and outfits to try on, and fooled around with one of AI Limit’s precious few unique mechanics, the Sync Rate meter, which is charged up by attacking things and loses power when you take hits or use special abilities that consume it, like firing an electric railgun I found lying around. Most importantly, the Sync Rate meter also determines how much damage your weapons do, rewarding you for keeping the meter full, and punishing you for depleting it, which made for a pretty interesting tradeoff.
AI Limit might not be immediately groundbreaking at first blush, but I’m definitely intrigued by its fantastic presentation enough to add it to my list of soulslikes I’m excited to play. With a release date planned for later this year, it seems I won’t have to wait too much longer.
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