AI Limit Review
I feel pretty good when I get to play a soulslike, even if many of the games in that category may not have the best representation of what the genre can offer. The peak of the genre is still Bloodborne, for me at least, but even the worst offenders are typically serviceable. The general quality of games has gone up in the past decade, so many reviews feel like collections of nitpicks in the grand scheme of things. AI Limit is the perfect encapsulation of that: a genuinely good-but-not-great game that is unfortunately just one more in an ocean of other genuinely good-but-not-great games.
You start AI Limit in a sewer with no memory and make your way through the introduction dungeon while learning the basics of the game. This part does feel like a find-and-replace version of Dark Souls — Souls are Crystals, Mana/Magic is "Mud", Bonfires are Branches, and so on. Instead of playing as a Chosen Undead, someone slapped a NieR-like android in its place. Yes, you do get multiple outfits for your character and yes, you do get to see butt jiggle physics the entire time.
You have a perfect parry that stuns and opens up enemies to counterattacks, a shield that absorbs a percentage of damage, magic that ranges from railgun lasers to lightning bolts to fireballs and everything in between, a slew of weapons ranging from giant two-handers to dual daggers, and the ablility to customize your "frame" with several gear choices to better suit your build. Everything in that previous sentence (except for the word "frame") could be applied to Dark Souls just as easily.
If it sounds like I'm being condescending, I'm really not. More Souls, for me at least, is never a bad thing, even if the genre is starting to get a little bloated. I love maneuvering my character through tightly designed corridors and picking apart legions of goons in one-on-one or two-on-one combat before discovering a large-ass boss who beats me senseless for a few lives before I figure out the timing windows. That's not a joke; that is really fun for me — and if it is fun for you, you'll like AI Limit, full stop.
However, the nitpicking is where I have to do my job, so here we go: the game doesn't deviate enough from the Dark Souls formula to stand out from the crowd. There are a few really neat ideas — for example, you cannot have a parry and a shield at the same time, so you are forced to swap between the two depending on your playstyle. Your shield absorbs a percentage of damage that can then be turned into a counterattack (and if you choose not to counterattack, further blocks will drain your stamina bar in increasingly dangerous amounts, which does not engender passivity and in fact discourages it). Your shield meter, stamina meter, and magic meter are all one-and-the-same (named as Mud), so magic builds cannot necessarily sit at max range and snipe endlessly without mixing it up in melee to restore Mud.
Beyond that, however, everything else feels...rote to a degree. The character designs and monsters are all okay to good, save for a few encounters, and the levels are pretty expertly designed (including a poison swamp, of course), but beyond the spectacle of seeing a level sprawl out before you when you first enter, it all feels too familiar, and not necessarily in a good way. The story is all told piecemeal through item descriptions and brief cutscenes, but instead of taking place in an old fantasy universe, we're in the far future of the post-apocalypse with robots and androids.
Finally, there were several technical issues with my playthrough. My first run of AI Limit was unfortunately halted pretty early on due to a sequence-breaking bug: a specific boss that teleported around the arena was sniped on the same frame that it finished teleporting, and died. The battle music did not finish, and I did not receive any key items, so I could not progress. Reloading the game did not fix it, and returning to a Branch did not fix it, so that save file was dead. Beyond that, invisible terrain causing my character to vibrate at a high frequency up and down was discovered in numerous levels, and in a few specific instances, my character would get knocked through the floor (though I could not reproduce these issues with any regularity.) My understanding is these bugs have been fixed in a recent patch, but as a result of my bugs, I could not complete the game.
AI Limit is a good game — I love futuristic post-apocalypse settings, I love the aesthetic of the game, and I love how it feels in both navigation and combat. But it is a safe game — it paints very cleanly and neatly within the Dark Souls lines, and it does not try anything new or attempt to separate from the crowd at all. For some, like myself, that's perfectly fine, but for others, it's nothing you haven't seen before. Whether that's worth the price of admission (admittedly, pretty good at $35 USD as of this writing) is up to you, but just don't go in expecting to have your mind blown.