The first thing you notice when traversing the abandoned buildings and creepy aqueducts of AI Limit is how stylish and fresh everything looks, and as it turns out, that killer presentation really does matter. Sure, it’s another Soulslike with the same aged campfire checkpoint system, punishing combat encounters, and super gross bosses that really need to take a chill pill, but I have to admit that the anime-inspired, sleek, and cartoony art style really won me over, and I can see this becoming my next sweaty obsession – you know, maybe as a nice chase between Shadow of the Erdtree sessions.
Like countless contemporaries of the genre, AI Limit makes no apologies for its inspiration; it’s a Soulslike through and through. You scavenge materials from fallen enemies to spend on stat upgrades, find weapons and gear in every monster-filled hallway to customize your combat style and abilities, and of course, die a ton of times as some tough boss with sedate anger management issues uses your face as a doormat. Classic Soulslike!
And at least in the hour-long demo I played, AI Limit seems content to follow that plan to the letter, offering virtually no novel tweaks to the formula or reasons to play it over a pile of similar games. With one notable exception: the endlessly impressive and hard-to-look-away art style.
That might not sound like enough of a standout to keep me interested, and yet I found it to be a major reason I was eager to tear through each deadly zone to see what awesome-looking thing awaited me in the next area. Much like the Persona series follows the customary JRPG playbook very closely, but stands out for its oozing style and unmatched confidence, AI Limit really stood out to me in many of the same ways. Whether it was the sleek and engaging UI, or the combat animations that made me feel like the main character in an action-packed anime, I found myself nodding in approval as I easily cut down an enemy, even when every other aspect was pretty much by-the-numbers.
I will say, however, that it is a bit surprising that for all the style that AI Limit has, the protagonist, at least in the demo, is woefully expressionless. With no dialogue and a straight face throughout, there is nothing beyond neat-looking outfits and cute combat animations for me to fall back on. She doesn’t even make a sound when she takes damage or dies, which just seems odd. I get that the lady is supposed to be a robot, but why give her a human appearance at all if you’re not going to give her any humanity? Hopefully, these details just didn’t make it into this early version of the game.
The demo confined me to an early area that seemed pretty clearly intended as an introductory tutorial zone, but I still managed to find a few novel weapons to try out and outfits to try on, and played around with one of the few valuable unique AI Limit mechanics, the Sync Rate meter, which charges up by attacking things and loses power when you take hits or employ special abilities that drain it, like firing the electro-magnetic cannon I found lying around. Crucially, 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 was a pretty engaging trade-off.
AI Limit may not be groundbreaking at first glance, but I’m definitely intrigued enough by its fantastic presentation that I’ve added it to my list of Soulslikes I can’t wait to play. With a release date scheduled for later this year, it looks like I won’t have to wait too long.
