AI Limit Review

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AI Limit offers a souls-like experience without the depth, delivering approximately 30 ordinary hours of dodging and sword fighting, primarily serving as a time-filler. I battled through monotonous enemies in forgettable environments, defeated weak bosses whose names I barely recall, and spent more time rebooting after game freezes than uncovering intriguing aspects about the generic sci-fi backdrop or its characters. The attractive art style, intelligent Sync Rate system, and customizable abilities are interesting modifications to the formula, but they’re too minor to make a lasting impact. If you’re desperately seeking more chances to satisfy your souls-like cravings, AI Limit might not be the worst choice, but there are certainly many better options available.

Much like a seasoned fan of souls-like games, I’m quite familiar with the routine of dying multiple times to conquer challenging sections. However, my experience with AI Limit was unique because it made me feel the repetition before even meeting my first demise. This game, characterized by its anime-influenced art and a handful of minor skills gained over the storyline, can be described as unremarkable and unoriginal in the souls-like genre.

It presented me with monotonous and insipid adversaries, feeble and easily defeated bosses, and a narrative as dull as its protagonist. To be fair, AI Limit doesn’t have many egregiously bad aspects (except for the frequent crashes and bugs that disrupt gameplay), but it lacks anything noteworthy in this forgettable adventure, either.

In a vaguely defined science fiction world, a catastrophic event has led to societal collapse and the rise of an ominous black sludge that’s both harmful to life and edible for regeneration. As an android named Blader, your purpose is to restore balance in this world by eliminating virtually everything you encounter.

Navigating through the remnants of a civilization seemingly designed using a trope-filled manual, you’ll explore a sewer as your tutorial area and face a compulsory poison swamp level due to the Miyazaki Accords of 2011 – an authentic, enforceable law that requires such elements. The robotic nature of Blader ensures they lack any discernible personality traits, communicating in a monotonous tone throughout the approximately 30-hour journey.

Despite having a shrouded setting and a nondescript protagonist being common tropes in games of this genre, you may have hoped that AI Limit would differentiate itself. However, it seems that it adheres to these conventions rather than breaking them.

The action is largely an impression of better soulslikes.

The gameplay primarily emulates a style similar to popular Souls-like games, where you’ll navigate between ominous and perilous environments, fight off smaller adversaries on your path to reach save points (represented by branches), and face intimidating bosses with extensive health bars and lethal attacks. However, the familiar structure loses its appeal quickly due to a scarcity of enemy types, repetitive and hollow levels, and combat that is excessively straightforward and not particularly challenging.

You’ll wield oversized melee weapons, fire off spells at your foes, and, as expected, dodge, roll, and parry to stay alive. Unfortunately, AI Limit’s combat doesn’t offer much novelty, but the few innovative ideas it introduces make me wish it was more daring.

The primary feature among these mechanics is the Sync Rate gauge, which increases as you inflict damage and depletes when you cast spells or get injured. A higher Sync Rate means greater damage output, but if you sustain too much harm or use excessive spells, you’ll find yourself in a vulnerable state, restricting your abilities until you deliver more attacks. This encourages cautious gameplay and enables faster boss fight clearance when you can dodge damage while pressing the offensive. Additionally, the Sync Rate serves as a substitute for mana meters or similar limitations, allowing your spell usage to be skill-based rather than restricted. Notably, AI Limit eliminates the stamina bar (a common annoyance in my opinion), enabling continuous attacks without worrying about exhaustion, provided you keep an eye on your Sync Rate.

The game offers an intriguing feature where you gain access to four unique abilities that can be swapped during battle, such as transforming an arm into a shield or activating a dash ability for quick movement. However, the initial ability you receive allows you to deflect enemy attacks (parry), and since this move is highly effective against most enemies, there’s little incentive to switch to other abilities because nearly everything can be parried. Consequently, while the idea of switching between these powers adds an element of strategy during combat, battles often don’t play out in such a way due to the dominance of the parry ability.

Bosses only very rarely have interesting designs.

In this game, you’ll typically face a limited variety of aliens that resemble discarded costumes from the creatures in Stranger Things and generic robots with repetitive attack patterns, which are easy to dodge or counter with minimal effort. They usually approach one at a time. The boss fights are generally predictable as well, with their moves being heavily telegraped and easily parried, causing them to pause for several seconds, allowing you to deal significant damage. Unfortunately, the designs of these bosses are often uninspired, with many being simple variations of the aliens you’ve already encountered or disappointingly recycled, either by reappearing as common enemies or by being used in another boss fight.

The game features a small number of similar-looking aliens and robots that are easy to avoid or counter, and they usually attack one at a time. Boss fights have simple patterns that can be easily predicted and countered, but the designs of these bosses are often unoriginal or reused in some way.

It’s regrettable that AI Limit doesn’t fully deliver on its potential throughout the game. However, it occasionally shines during specific moments, such as when the ordinary, lethargic bosses transform into thrilling battles against other Bladers. These encounters feature more dynamic and demanding move sets, and they require depleting their Sync Rate bars through attacks and parries to reduce damage and enable powerful finishing moves. Occasionally, AI Limit attempts innovative approaches, like a fight against a colossal robot that hides at the room’s end, firing lethal lasers. Defeating it requires destroying the power sources while battling its minions. Unfortunately, these exciting fights are rare, leaving you to confront the less interesting, large, unsightly, slow-moving enemies that dominate most of the boss battles.

A major hindrance to AI advancement is its tendency to be quite buggy, leading to numerous issues during gameplay. For instance, I encountered at least a dozen crashes, became stuck in environments that resulted in odd movements, fell through floors during boss battles, and once repetitively respawned at a save point until I exited the app from the PlayStation dashboard. Many of these crashes occurred when I was far from a checkpoint, forcing me to restart my progress without any fault on my part and losing valuable resources along the way. Notably, most of my most aggravating deaths were due to glitches rather than combat with enemies. This isn’t the type of challenge I had anticipated.

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2025-03-26 10:27