Artificial Superintelligence review - Reigns for a new generation

If you're the type to enjoy making seemingly minor choices that can make a huge difference, then you can sometimes find your choices slightly limited on mobile.

With Reigns 2 still a ways off, there's currently very little to get excited about – though Artificial Superintelligence will certainly scratch the itch for a short time.

It's a more modern take on the binary choice-focused title, though with a slightly less-intuitive UI and a simpler art style that will be off-putting to some.

Boot up

Playing Artificial Superintelligence couldn't be simpler – you're presented with a problem, and you have to choose between two solutions, each of which will impact different people in different ways.

Instead of taking charge of a nation, you're a startup tech firm in Silicon Valley, tasked with building the titular artificial intelligence through any means necessary.

Artificial Superintelligence

You have to keep your employees and investors happy, while also balancing the wants of the government and the Internet, making sure not to make either faction too happy or too angry.

It's never made clear how your choices will impact the different factions, but the game does let you know the severity of your actions in advance – it's up to you to work out whether this will be in your favour or not.

The goal is to keep everyone balanced enough until your AI can reach its full potential, but failure simply means you jump to a new multiverse and start over again.

Blue screen

For the most part, this is actually pretty enjoyable. The whole affair is very light-hearted, and has you starting flamewars with Internet trolls, dealing with malicious employees leaving dumb responses in your AI, and the eventual apocalypse caused by a computer that deems humanity a waste of time.

But somehow, while this game takes so many cues from Nerial's Reigns, it misses something incredibly key – a slick user interface.

To make a choice, you have to move a slider from to one end of a spectrum, a movement that somehow lacks the effortlessness of swiping through a deck of cards.

Artificial Superintelligence

It's an odd choice, given that you can only make two choices and a slider effectively allows for any number of options, but Artificial Superintelligence never uses it for this purpose and suffers because of it.

On top of that, some presentation choices feel weak. There's a decent amount of chunky pixel art throughout the game, giving it a pleasant retro feel, but the bulk of it is a more simplistic cartoon style which feels cheap in comparison.

How about a nice game of chess?

Overall, Artificial Superintelligence is fairly enjoyable throughout. It's fast-paced fun with plenty of fresh ideas, and enough dumb jokes scattered throughout that you'll never go long without a laugh.

But it suffers from a lacklustre UI and some graphical choices that are more of eye-sore than endearing due to their simplicity.

It'll almost certainly make up for a lack of a new Reigns for now, but it needs a bit more spit and polish to be truly great.

Artificial Superintelligence review - Reigns for a new generation

It's solidly written with some fresh ideas, but overall Artificial Superintelligence feels lacking and unpolished
Score
Ric Cowley
Ric Cowley
Ric was somehow the Editor of Pocket Gamer, having started out as an intern in 2015. He hopes to take over the world the same way.