"The First Berserker: Khazan (and AI Limit)" Review

Hello, dear readers, and welcome to what I consider to be the first "soft" double-feature. I call it this because while I'm covering two games today, I have significant things to say about one and very little about the other. These games are also both soulslikes, so it just makes sense to group them if I can't muster up a full review for one of them. So, here goes, starting with a clear frontrunner for high on the GOTY list: The First Berserker: Khazan.

Publisher: Nexon

Developer: Neople

Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows

It's amazing how many times demos don't represent the final product...in my experience, at least. I played the Prey demo back in the day and saw promise, but was ultimately not expecting much. Then, when the full game finally released, it was one of my favorites of the year! And on the opposite side of the spectrum, I thought AI Limit (the next game I'm covering in this article) was going to be great based on its demo...and that wasn't exactly the case. As for The First Berserker: Khazan (hereafter referred to as Khazan), I thought the demo was pretty boring. I'm not a big fan of the whole Conan the Barbarian-style dark fantasy aesthetic to begin with, and there didn't seem to be any promise for environmental diversity. The gameplay seemed promising enough, but undercooked. Still, it was getting rave reviews upon release, so I decided I'd get it and pick up where I left off. I think it's hardly surprising that Khazan ended up being exceptional, given everything I've already said. What is surprising, though, is the fact that it's exceptional in spite of my aesthetic takes being correct. But we'll get to that. For now, let's start with a bit about the story.

It may shock you to know that in The First Berserker: Khazan, you play as Khazan: a decorated general in the Pell Los Empire's army branded a traitor by the emperor, tortured, and sent off to his death. However, as often happens in these types of stories where someone is being transported to a negative fate via guarded caravan, said caravan is attacked, and Khazan finds himself free, but with an unwelcome spirit of vengeance taking refuge in his body. After some conflict, Khazan and the phantom within him join forces to seek revenge, determine the cause of conflict between the mortal world and the netherworld, and maybe, just maybe, learn to appreciate each other along the way! As you may be able to tell, this is a pretty simple story, and that's not a bad thing. Stories in soulslikes are almost always intentionally vague, so sometimes it's nice to have a clear narrative with a clear backstory and stakes. But it's still not that important, so, time to move on.

For gameplay, you have three weapon types to choose from: dual-wielded axes, greatswords, and spears. Each type has its own scaling and movesets, and certain bosses will be easier or harder depending on which type you have equipped. For instance, I used spears the whole time. In my experience, a later game boss with a shield wasn't nearly as hard for me as it was for others. Conversely, the penultimate boss was more difficult for me than it would be for a greatsword user, as the boss' poise could easily be broken with that weapon.

While there are only three weapon types, that doesn't mean there are only three weapons. This is a heavily loot-centric game, so there are thousands of each weapon type that you'll pick up. With that in mind, you'll constantly be switching to better variants of your weapon based either on pure damage or the side effects that a certain individual weapon has. You might, for example, have to choose between a spear that does 500 damage or a spear that does 480 damage but comes with a health increase and conditional attack boost. With that said, if you're anything like me, that might sound a little overwhelming. I can't stand these gray-blue-purple-gold rarity thousands of options loot systems. However, the game gives you several ways of disposing of your excess loot. You could break them down for materials to craft new gear. You can also trade them in for "Lacrima" (souls) or use them to improve gear that you've grown attached to.

Backtracking a little bit, each weapon type also comes with various skill trees you can invest in. These are largely new attacks that you launch in circumstances like right after dodging. There are also special attacks mapped to the face buttons which cost special attack points to launch. As you may be able to tell, there's lots and lots of combat options, but I'm going to keep it all as simple as possible. Lastly for this topic, you can re-spec your skill tree progress and stats pretty much at will, so if you find a boss that would be easier to beat with a different weapon type, you can set yourself up for success with that weapon fairly easily.

Now let's get into the actual details of combat. Like any soulslike, you have a dodge, a parry, a light attack, and a heavy attack, all of which cost stamina to use. When your stamina runs out, you're temporarily stunned if you get hit. Combat against enemies is about as straightforward as it gets, as the meat and potatoes of any soulslike is its bosses. 

With any given boss, your goal is going to be to break posture (dealing health damage along the way). Once you do that, you'll deal as much damage as possible while the boss recovers. You'll then rinse and repeat until you're victorious. Pretty simple on the surface, but as you may expect, you'll need to learn boss patterns and master your dodge or parry timings accordingly. But beyond that, in some later bosses, you'll need to determine which is better between the dodge or the parry. See, if a boss attack inflicts status effects, you'll still get some status chip progress if you parry. This means that if you want to avoid all status progress, you'll need to learn to dodge that attack instead of parrying. 

The specific kind of posture bar a boss has will also determine how you approach the fight. There are three postures: white, purple, and red. 

The white bar is usually reserved for human bosses, and it serves as the same kind of stamina bar you have. In these fights, the goal is to be aggressive to drain their stamina and compel the boss to start attacking, which naturally causes their stamina to deplete more. By forcing the boss to "get greedy", you set yourself up to deplete the bar, but if you misplay things, they'll start regenerating the stamina just like you would.

The purple bar is a more set-in-stone posture. This is a bar you'll chip down bit by bit with no fear of regeneration (until you break the posture and the recovery window ends). An especially important aspect of these bosses is knowing which attacks can be punished with a stun lock after a parry. In this way, you can play purple bar bosses more cautiously, look for specific attacks, parry, and wail on them until your stamina runs out, dealing massive posture damage.

The red bar is by far the hardest bar to deal with. It functions just like the purple bar, but the red denotes infinite poise for the boss. This means the stun lock possibility is off the table, so you have to play extra cautiously, as if the boss starts attacking at any point during your onslaught, you have to be defensive. 

If I had to levy one complaint against the bosses, it would be that you do so little damage that any attempt feels like it takes forever. Even if you constantly upgrade your damage dealing, you're going to notice that boss health depletes at a snail's pace. This probably sounds like a much bigger issue than I mean for it to sound like. That's because, as odd as it sounds, despite this being easily the hardest non-From Software soulslike I've ever played, the challenge always feels beatable. I don't have any weird hangups about summoning NPC help, but I did here. No matter how many times I got creamed by a boss, I'd usually keep thinking "I can do this." Attack patterns are unusually easy to learn but hard to master, and this means that even the bosses that are harder to manage with your chosen weapon type are reasonable asks. They won't feel like that initially, but I promise you'll see what I mean if you stick with it. 

One example boss is one named (minor spoiler alert) Elemain. She's the shield-using boss I alluded to in the weapon type blurb. As I said, some people had a miserable time with her, but I believe it's possible to greet challenges like these enthusiastically. So you should look at challenges like that and say hello! Of course, if you don't have the right mindset, you may get your ass handed to you, look at that challenge, and tell the challenge you were just kidding about that confidence. All this to say some bosses might seem overpowered, but I have to reiterate that the power gap isn't quite what it seems. 

So, in other words, with all of that last section in mind, if you're one of those players destined to have a hard time with Elemain, I would encourage you to not end up saying HI, JK, Elemain OP..................and yes, I did contrive a whole convoluted terribly-written mini-paragraph just to make that joke. With that goal now achieved, I'll move on.

Another thing that makes that minor damage issue less of a problem than it sounds like is the fact that combat feels as good as Lies of P's combat does. There's a distinct punchiness to the sound design, and the animations make every attack feel more powerful than they otherwise might. The damage factor still is an issue, just not a huge one.

The sound design and animations are, as I just finished explaining, some of Khazan's biggest technical achievements. The rest of the package is a bit more mixed. For instance, the overall look of the game is bigtime ugly. The semi cell-shaded style just feels muted and bland, and with level design that doesn't change much, it makes for a somewhat unpleasant viewing experience. Normally I say that I can't throw stones in this department since my favorite game of all time is Dragon Age: Origins, but in this case the presentation across the board is so excellent that the bad visuals actually do kind of detract from the experience a little bit. I also realize the image I used for this section makes that all seem like a bunch of nonsense, but it's a still image, not in-game. The only other things I can think of are some small AI glitches and one large glitch that caused trophies not to pop. How do I know this? Because on the evening that a patch came out, I suddenly had about 10 trophies unlock (that I'd evidently already earned) upon starting the game up. I've heard others say that they've experienced more bugs than I have, so suffice it to say that Khazan is a bit rougher around the edges than one might like. 

Folks, word of mouth hasn't necessarily been as widespread for Khazan as it has been for other games this year, so let me potentially be the first to tell you this: while my beloved Lies of P is still the best soulslike, The First Berserker: Khazan easily claims a spot in the upper echelon. If you're a fan of soulslikes, you probably have already heard of this...but if you haven't, I think you're going to find an easy GOTY contender in Khazan!

Let us review:

Minuscule damage issue - 0.5

Small technical flaws - 0.5

The final score for The First Berserker: Khazan is...

9.0/10 - Fantastic

Excellent work, Neople, excellent work! 

Publisher: Beijing CE-ASIA

Developer: SenseGames

Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Microsoft Windows

Now we go from one absolutely excellent soulslike to one that is simply ok. But it's important to remember that "ok" isn't bad...in fact, in my mind it just means good in its lowest possible form. So again, not "bad"...It's just that compared to Khazan, AI Limit doesn't quite measure up. With comparison, as we know, being the thief of joy, that's the last time I'll be making comparisons between the two in this article. So, let's talk about AI Limit on its own terms.

AI Limit has the distinct honor of being the second soulslike with an anime coat of paint (with the first, of course, being Code Vein) as well as the second soulslike within the past year featuring an attractive female protagonist with bazongas where a personality ought to be. But all of that is fairly reductive. In AI Limit, you play as Arissa: a "blader" who has to travel through a ruined world for some vague soulslike reason that eventually, as all anime plots are want to do, becomes about killing god. But as I've already said in this article and many others, story is kind of secondary to the modern soulslike, so I'll move on shortly. It should be noted, however, that Arissa is probably the single most boring protagonist I've ever had to play as. She has a speaking role, which I find astounding given that all she does is repeat what other characters say with a question mark at the end so they can elaborate. 

"You need to open the door."

"The door?"

"Yes. You can probably find a terminal to do so on the other side of the facility."

That kind of thing. Nonstop. But again, secondary. 

With gameplay being the primary focus of any soulslike, the purely ok nature of AI Limit becomes clear when one considers how polarized the experience is. Bosses are almost universally pushovers, while minibosses and some basic enemies seem unfair. There were some bosses that I got absolutely creamed by within seconds of starting, but in a second attempt I found the correct parry timing and cheesed the boss to death in under a minute without taking any damage. It wasn't just one boss, either. Don't get me wrong: I disagree with the notion that bosses have to be unforgiving in this genre. I believe the genre (outside of From Software, at least) has pivoted away from difficulty as the focus in favor of a focus on the general soulslike gameplay loop and how it can be iterated on. However, that doesn't mean I necessarily want to be able to parry and critical hit my way through a big cinematic event within 30 seconds. Some kind of balance is key, and this game could hardly be more lacking in that department. 

One boss, however, is a foregone conclusion for a spot on my best bosses of the year award. But before I get into that, let's talk a bit about how gameplay actually happens on a moment-to-moment basis. The loop is largely centered around your "sync rate." A high sync rate means you deal more damage. You build up that rate by attacking, and doing things like taking damage, casting spells, or mistiming parries reduces it. This is a system I can actually appreciate, as it provides a risk/reward scenario for almost anything you do, but not a gigantic one. The boss I started this section talking about is a character just like Arissa, and she also features the sync rate system. So, when you deal damage, she deals less damage, and when she deals damage, you deal less. It's a brilliant give and take idea, but it goes further than that. Once you've reduced her sync rate to zero, you get the chance to land a critical hit for massive damage. And once you do that, she regains her sync rate, but only about half of it. In this way, playing aggressively can allow you to get her back down to critical range quickly, but you can't play sloppily or else she'll get back up to a high sync rate and start wailing on you again. This was easily the boss that handed me my rear end more times than any of the others, but it was also the one boss that I was bigtime impressed by. 

A couple housekeeping items before moving on from gameplay, all of which are sadly negative. Healing is a major problem here, for starters. Usage of healing items is akin to low adaptability Dark Souls II healing speed, and even after several upgrades to healing efficiency, you gain so little health back that you basically have no choice but to use multiple healing items in a pinch. And while things like level design aren't necessarily to be lumped in with gameplay, I think the discussion fits better here. Levels in AI Limit suffer from locked door syndrome. If you come across any door ever, it will be locked (and Arissa will blandly state that fact). Locked doors are a staple of soulslike level design, but it feels like it's done to a hitherto untouched degree here. In addition, there are many levels that are laid out in ways that would feel at home in an old school adventure game. Not in the moon logic sense, but in the sense of "where on earth do I go and how do I get there?" A key example is a sewer level (because of course there's one of those) where, in order to progress, you need to find a key on one specific enemy in the level and use it on a terminal that is, for all intents and purposes, off the beaten path. This turns some machines in the level and allows you to access a path you couldn't before. Key items required for progression aren't a new idea in soulslikes, but typically these items are rewards for beating a boss or can be found in a trader's inventory...not on some random enemy off the beaten path in an already labyrinthine area. 

On the technical side of things, AI Limit continues to be just around the baseline of good at most. Some of the visuals hit me right where I live, but there's also quite a lot of boring gray concrete levels. In a similar vein, some of the enemy and boss designs are decent, but the vast majority feel uninspired. Hit boxes can also feel random at times. In fact, in many boss fights, my losses would be because of these hit boxes. An attack that looks like it's a long way away from hitting will somehow hit, for example. Once you learn that, it's a fairly simple matter to parry at the correct time and cheese the boss until you win, but it still speaks to a lack of care in the actual design of these things. I also had two hard crashes, but other glitches didn't seem to occur. 

AI Limit doesn't do any one thing too well, but it also doesn't do anything offensively bad. In some ways that makes it a worse experience than something objectively more flawed...but I did at least enjoy parts of it. It's safe to say that this game will be forgotten before the year is up, but it's at least worth finishing if for some reason you've already spent the money or found a decent sale. High praise, I know, but c'est la vie!

Let us review:

99% poor boss design - 1.0

Other gameplay woes - 1.0

Technical woes - 1.0

Unbearably boring protagonist - 0.3

The final score for AI Limit is...

6.7/10 - Almost Good

Ehh, ok, SenseGames, ehh, ok.