Like twisted metal only with robots.
It is layed out pretty wierd and it had god awful hillbilly country music in it which I am violently opposed to so I put up my guard and looked for reasons to hate the game. I went through the tutorial section that only shows you what to do instead of actually letting you try it out and then I built my first SV(scoot vehicle) with my starting cash.
SLAI is a sport of the future. The goal is to defeat all the nobodies in an arena and then you will get the chance to fight the Ranker. If you beat that guy then you become the Ranker and you move on to the next arena and do it all over again. A rumble which is what a match is consists of 3 other SV's and 1-2 drones. If you defeat an SV then a new one will enter the rumble including people you have beat before. The only way to end a rumble is to leave by exiting one of three gates in the arena. You can stay for as long as you want but eventually you will face rankers who have tough SV's and even crashers who are super tough and show up especially to pick on weaker SV's.
So if you get greedy it can cost you everything hehe but thats what makes it fun, you can never feel safe and you have to always be on your toes.
During a match there are 1-3 supply drop zones. There are little aerial drones that fly overhead and drop money,health, and ammo into the supply zones. They usually cycle between them and if you look into the sky you can see where they are and where they are going. Grabbing supply's is critical to how long you can last and even how much money you make.
Each enemy SV has a money amount tied to it that you get for killing it, there is also stuff to blow up in the arena's, and you can pick up cash cubes that get dropped into the supply zones.
A cool thing about the game is you only have to pair for repairs if stuff gets destroyed. You dont pay for armor and ammo otherwise. Losing an arm or shoulder weapon is no big deal but if you SV gets trashed your looking at a fairly large chunk of change.
You can use your money to buy new weapons and SV's or to modify existing stuff. Modifying stuff is a trade off, you can inflict more damage, have more armor, or carry more weight but then you will have less ammo, less mobility, or other things.
I havent messed around with that to much, modifying is hella expensive and it will probably also make your repair bills sky rocket.
Your SV's also have these AI chips with animal persona's. As you fight they gain experience and make your SV actually perform better. They can lock on faster, jump higher, move faster, all kinds of stuff. This is the most important part of the game and what makes you able to fight stronger opponents.
AI chips take damage in battle though and you have to repair them constantly(fairly cheap) but if they take alot of damage it lowers their max HP. If your chip ever runs out of HP during a fight it DIES and you lose all that experience and your SV will perform alot worse than it did. When a chip gets damaged enough then you have to do a Chip Transfer where they copy your chips info onto a new chip with its original max HP. This is hella expensive though.
The actual combat in SLAI is fun. Your four shoulder buttons control your two arms and two shoulders. Your left stick controls movement and your right stick controls looking. Circle and Sqaure control left/right evasion and X controls jumping. One of the most important parts of combat is Optical Camoflague. There are a few different OC's with varrying runtimes and downtimes. Your OC will make you invisable to "some" weaponry for a number of seconds and then after that time is up it has to recharge.
You use it to find prey and get the jump on them, You dont use it during a fight. While you are invis you take more damage and if you get hit your OC drops. You can make the game run it automatically or you can run your OC manually with the triangle button. I run mine on my own but its a pain in the butt. Im just to lazy to change it lol.
SLAI has 5 cities spread over the world that have SLAI battles. Each city has D/C/B/A/challenge/Free rank battles. The D-A rank battles also have night/day divisions. SLAI is divided up into seasons of 100 days. Each day is a different rank battle. You will find yourself flying between all the cities so that you can fight in specific rank battles. Like if your in New York and you just finished a D rank battle it might be 4+ days before another D rank battle but there might be one in Las Vegas the next day so you fly to Las Vegas.
Each city only has one arena. The arena's are pretty 3d and offer tons of terrain to jump on and hide behind and race across.
When you not fighting your hanging out online. Each city is like this internet/matrix place where your INSIDE the internet or something. Neon lights and glowing signs and stuff. Each city has all the same buildings. Places to buy SV parts, Chip stores, SV Dealers, music stores, modifying shops, and some other places.
The music store is pretty cool. The game has quite a few sound tracks to choose from from rock to techno to heavy metal to that country hillbilly crap. Once you buy tracks you can create playlists for your battles. Im not a huge video game music fan but there are around 13-16 songs that I really like in this game. They really enhance the battles.
This game can be pretty exausting, you will be doing lots of reloading. You will be having an awesome match and then some crasher will have snuck into your match and scrap you in seconds before you even know what hit you and have to reload the game. Thats why im really glad they have a Instant Replay feature. When I have a really nice long match that ended successfully I always watch the replays. The game records the first 5 minutes of your match. If you take out a ranker for the first time though the recording will end right there. But you can change the camera angle during the replay and stuff.
When your playing you can play from behind your SV or press on the directional buttons and play FPS. I tried that once and it was wierd, you can see behind you and stuff so I didnt like it. I think it gives you a better view of whats in front of you though.
Im still fighting in the D rank battles and sometimes I run into guys that screw me over good like the butthole in Carro Nighttime D rank. I can't imagine playing in A rank rumbles. So I would call this game very difficult and challenging which isnt really my thing but as long as I can hang out in the D's and own people I will be happy with my purchase.
I know nobody has heard of or played this game but in my opinion its definately worth owning. Its just fun and it grows on you.