Soulslike’s are no longer a new and thrilling concept that can achieve great things on genre alone. With industry giants like Elden Ring and successful riffs like Nioh, The Surge and Lies of P, lovers of all things punishing are spoilt for choice. Now, to stand out in a trending genre, you can no longer just make a Soulslike with a small twist and hope for the best. You need to offer something compelling, something unique, something that stops folks in their tracks, forcing them to raise an eyebrow and unsheath their oversized sword in sexy anticipation of the challenge that is to come. It’s more vital than ever, or there is a real risk of getting lost in the shuffle. AI Limit is a Soulslike with a small twist, hoping for the best.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. AI Limit is an action RPG in a neat post-apocalyptic sci-fi setting, where you play as Arrisa, a ‘Blader’ who has the very handy video game trait of immortality. You will explore the city ruins to find a new life, with civilisation on the verge of extinction thanks to a strange substance not-so-creatively called the Mud. Worse than the type my dogs drag in on a regular basis, this stuff causes monsters to emerge from it. It’s a fine setup (emphasis on fine) that doesn’t go too deep, made all the more forgettable by the monotone voice delivery of Arrisa. She sounds about as fed up with the repetitive pitfalls of the genre as I am, as she ho-hums her way through awkward conversations with strange characters that don’t go anywhere interesting.

AI Limit does have some small ideas that it tries to leverage, which differentiate it slightly from its peers. For example, it uses a Sync Rate bar, which fills up as you do damage but drains when you’re using certain spells or taking hits yourself. If you have a higher Sync Rate, you’ll actually do more damage, and on the flipside, when it’s low, you’ll be weaker than usual. This creates a neat push and pull where you’ll want to choose when to use big spells tactfully and then retreat to a more hack ‘n’ slash style so that you can fill up your Sync Rate again to unleash another whallop.

There’s no stamina bar either, so you can hack away and dodge to your heart’s content, removing some of the sluggish combat pace complaints from some of the greats. You’ll eventually unlock four different core abilities, which you can flip between mid-combat. The first, and by far the most useful, allows you to parry attacks, leaving enemies super vulnerable to lay the smackdown on. The next, a shield, which, after absorbing some punishment, can be used to unleash a powerful strike. Later, you’ll be lightning-fast (literally), zipping about the place and leaving an electric shock surprise for your foes. While the variety is nice here, I defaulted to the far-too-effective parry in about 95% of my encounters. Usually, one parry staggers a baddie enough to wipe out a whole health bar, so even though the other options were fun, they weren’t anywhere near as efficient.

Considering how synonymous ‘challenge’ is within the genre, AI Limit mostly feels relatively breezy to play. Enemies don’t offer much variety, and their moves are all very well telegraphed. The aforementioned parry makes things even easier, perhaps leaving them open for attacks slightly too long. I mostly ran through levels with reckless abandon, not concerned about the corners I couldn’t see or enemies lurking menacingly in the distance. The stakes never felt too high; this is in part due to another slight difference to the well-worn formula, where dying doesn’t force you to lose all of your acquired crystals (your main currency for upgrades/shopping) and run back to your corpse to collect them. Instead, you’ll simply be penalised a percentage, meaning the rare times I did falter, I found myself still able to make substantial upgrades with the crystals I had left.

This makes a decent argument for AI Limit to work well as an entry into Soulslikes for those who have avoided them in the past due to their crushing difficulty. If you die, you’ll still be able to make progress, and the window for parrying and dodging is quite generous. Only a couple of the bosses later on really had me tested; smaller, faster enemies like other Bladers who required more precise timing and had more unpredictable patterns. While it might not offer a serious trial, AI Limit at least delivers a competent experience that I’d almost go as far as categorising as “a Soulslike to unwind with”, as opposed to “a Soulslike to make you throw your entire 75-inch TV out the window in sheer frustration and madness”, like so many others.

A lot of online chatter has talked about the anime art style and setting, championing this as a point of difference amongst the fantastical grimdark we normally see in Soulslikes broadly. AI Limit, of course, isn’t the first to do that, but even then, its art style can only go so far when it’s so regularly focused on sewers, poison swamps and abandoned crumbling cities that take those genre tropes, shrug and say: “Sure, why not?”.  Although, during my time with it, there were some bugs in need of severe squashing, like straight-up crashes or one that kept occurring where enemies would spawn with no limbs at all, just floating hats and weapons, making them slightly trickier to contend with (but, rather comically, still not hard enough to make it into a proper challenge).