AI Limit review – a competent but forgettable soulslike

Since Dark Souls’ debut in 2011, multiple clones have aspired to its popularity and craft. A few have even reached serious critical and commercial success, like Nioh and Lies of P. AI Limit is at once ambitious and scaled down in the realm of soulslikes. Closer to the action-forward design of Bloodborne than the grand excess of Elden Ring, AI Limit can’t compete with the higher budgets of its kin. Instead, developer Sense Games hones its action to a mirror sheen, perhaps familiar but too damn exciting to ignore. In its brass tacks, it is both impressive and capable. However, it is also derivative to a fault. For all its virtues, AI Limit lands in the realm of detestable homage.

Fundamentally, AI Limit follows the same soulslike game formula as its influences. You are a lone drifter wandering a barren and forsaken world with few friends. You execute light attacks with the right bumper and heavy ones with the right trigger. The game’s levels are dotted with safe havens – branches, not bonfires – where you can level up, fast travel to other locations, and refill your health potions for the next bout. Enemies drop currency upon death, which you spend on leveling up and buying items from merchants.

AI Limit’s alterations of this formula are small but meaningful. For example, there is no stamina bar; you can mash attacks as much as you like (though enemies will punish if you try and deal one hit too many). In its place is sync rate, a meter set from zero to 100 that determines attack power. From 40-70, you deal normal amounts of damage – any lower and you take a reduction; any higher, you get a bonus. The meter depletes with every enemy hit and with the use of special abilities and spells. You regain sync rate by landing hits on enemies, with a big boost from nailing powerful attacks like sneak kills.

This interacts with the game’s other systems in smart ways. Protagonist Arrisa’s left hand is a spell frame where you can equip special abilities like a parry or shield. Landing a parry and a follow-up attack boosts your sync rate, but any failed parries deplete it. Blocking with your shield prevents most damage, but your sync rate takes the hit instead. Casting spells and using your weapon’s special ability also drains the meter. In this way, AI Limit punishes mistakes with more than just a hit to health. Blocking too much or flailing with each attempted parry can spiral to the point where you don’t deal much damage and you can’t use your special attacks or spells to compensate. AI Limit has no shortage of fun tools, but it forces you to learn the fundamentals before getting fancy.

The sync rate system, combined with the absence of a stamina meter, makes AI Limit’s combat feel conversational. It encourages quick responses to openings and offers a variety of tools to deal with attacks. It’s aggressive, but still requires a keen eye and patience. Improperly tuned, a soulslike can feel like a chore instead of a rush. AI Limit is frequently exhilarating, tricky, and clever.

Unfortunately, AI Limit struggles at a macro level; you’ll find its levels familiar if you’ve played a single Dark Souls game. Both feature a narrow causeway protected by a powerful being that rains fire on you, low-level enemies tossing fire bombs in a multilayered shanty town, and a dank swamp that slowly poisons you with every step you take in it. These designs still have some juice – these evocative and layered levels are a major reason why Dark Souls is such a classic – but it’s hard to say that someone wouldn’t be better off just playing From Software’s hit. AI Limit has so little to add that these levels don’t even feel like playing the hits. It’s more like watching a middling cover band to fail to capture their inspiration’s fading glory.

AI Limit’s art direction suffers even more from its derivativeness. The game pulls most directly from the bare apocalypse of Nier: Automata. Flooded city streets, dark sewers, and sprawling technological wonders make up its world, yet AI Limit fails to conjure a single exciting or unpredictable vista, something Dark Souls and Nier deliver constantly. This follows through to character design. Arrisa is dressed in armored fetish wear similar to Nier protagonist 2B, but most of Arrisa’s outfits are too ornate, and all of them lack a silhouette on the level of 2B’s iconic design. Arrisa is just another ice queen anime girl. Give me Melania or Lucatiel over that any day.

Which brings us to the narrative. AI Limit starts with mysteries aplenty and keeps its cards close to its chest. All Arrisa knows at the start is that she is a Blader, a sort of warrior robot, whose purpose is to link the branches. However, she quickly encounters competing factions: the Church, which funnels pilgrims to its technologically advanced cities, and the Necros, undead creatures created for a mysterious purpose.

The world-building may seem mysterious, but AI Limit is content to exposit more directly. Side quests are easier to find and progress through than Dark Souls or Bloodborne, and NPCs explain the world in plain terms. While it still revolves around core mysteries, you won’t have to dig through item descriptions to develop theories. This does give AI Limit some accessible emotional heft. One of the first NPCs Arrisa encounters is Shirley, a girl seeking pilgrimage. She is a parallel character to Arrisa; though far less capable of violence, Shirley is also an innocent, unfamiliar with the world, who moves through it without guile or assumption. Both Shirley and Arrisa become familiar with its cruelties and kindnesses, which results in some powerful moments. But AI Limit’s straightforwardness means that it lacks its inspirations’ vivid tone. It is sometimes touching, but seldom evocative.

AI Limit is so indebted that it’s tough to take it on its own terms. Through it, the post-post-apocalyptic existentialism of Nier: Automata is wed to the quick-thinking thrills of Bloodborne. But in that wedding, the strangeness of both is wrung out, leaving only derivative husks behind. I recall a story I first heard from my brother when he pitched Dark Souls to me. He said that creator Hidetaka Miyazaki was inspired by reading English-language fairy tales as a child. At the time, Miyazaki couldn’t read English well and gained only a half-understanding from illustrations and the occasional word. Consequently, playing Dark Souls is like reading a book you don’t quite understand, and requires an imaginative leap to comprehend. It is a consummate videogame, but playing it carries something of the real world. AI Limit, whatever thrills it provides, can boast no such thing.