Laika: Aged Through Blood is a western-inspired motorvania set in a post-apocalyptic desert. It is the story about a tribe oppressed by occupant forces, and the personal story of a mother coyote warrior who descends on an endless path of vengeance to take back what her people lost.
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Aunque había escuchado maravillas del juego ha seguido siendo una sorpresa. Esperaba encontrarme un metroidvania de disparos usando a un zorrito muy cute. No hay nada "cute" en la historia. Y te lo deja claro en los primeros segundos de partida. El tono, el arte, el mundo que crean y por supuesto LA MÚSICA!. Se nota muchísimo cariño y detalle en todo. Acabe con lagrimillas (y hubo varias a lo largo del juego). Una maravilla que seguiré visitando de vez cuando para darme un par de paseos.
This has such a visually pleasing art style and vibe to it but its just on the cusp of being something epic winner. If the quests and general progression was just a bit tighter, and the cutscenes were maybe just a smidgem longer than 2 seconds idk it could really be something
There won't be any plot spoilers in this review but I will mention certain items necessary for progression and non-contextualized moments throughout the game. I have not finished the game yet and plan on doing so, but I'm close to the end.
Starting off with the positives: this game looks amazing. The art, the style, the animations, and the details; they're all very visually appealing. I enjoy the character designs quite a bit, they all complement the world they live in and the details in their animations make interacting with them feel very real.
The game's dialogue can be a little cringeworthy at times. There's definitely an overuse of cursing, but it's not enough to take away from it as an immersive and charming experience. The overall atmosphere of Laika is one that can keep you hooked for quite some time.
The music is good, and I enjoy the unique mechanic behind it playing in theory. In Laika, areas don't have their own themes as you'd expect in other Metroidvanias; instead, your soundtrack is what Laika listens to on her music player and you can expand what songs you hear by discovering cassettes throughout the world. This is a really cool idea in concept, but in execution, it leads to a lot of repetition of the same songs. Eventually I started to play the game without sound on because I got sick of hearing the "oooooh, ooooh, ooohoohoooh" beginning of one song and the rest just got stale. There's also another problem with the system that I'll address further on in the review.
Moving on, I didn't know what to expect when I first heard about this game. I never liked those old motorcycle flash games but I really enjoy Metroidvanias; so a crossover between those two stuck out to me as something I should try. This game, at its best, is so much fun, and some of the most rewarding and enjoyable combat I've experienced in a game of this kind. If you can really master the mechanics, then you're gonna roam the wastelands feeling like a total badass the entire way through. There's a lot of special effects and details that make shooting birds feel extremely cathartic. Shielding yourself from bullets with your bike, parrying bullets, the different types of weapons... there's a lot you can do here to kill enemies and it makes traversing the wasteland feel amazing. I think it's also cool that the game makes you do flips in order to reload your guns and your parry ability. The level design lends itself to those pretty well. However, when you aren't totally owning the game, that's when the drawbacks to the combat system start to drag the game down. You die in a single hit, which isn't a problem in and of itself; there's respawn points EVERYWHERE and the biggest punishment you'll receive is losing money that you have to reclaim from where you died ala Hollow Knight. You also die if you mess up a flip or a landing. This is intentional; respawning after death is addressed in-universe as Laika's family's superpower and you receive achievements for dying a bunch. You're going to die a LOT in Laika. However, enemies will also respawn upon death, and more begin to appear as you progress through the game. Some of these enemies are just so annoying to deal with. There's ones who shoot lock-on missiles that don't lose sight of you, so you need to take out the missile if you have one going after you; there's the ones with the gatling guns that you can't shoot from the front, but my least favorites are the ones who jump out of crates and shoot out like a million kunai in a huge circle around them. I hate those ones not JUST because you only have a small timeframe to shoot them, but because the game tricks you into thinking you can shoot them before their hitbox actually comes out, meaning if you're not paying attention, you're gonna waste a bullet. There's also a mechanic where you can keep shooting enemies after they're dead in order to build up a combo, as well as shoot their weapons to make them fire. All this ends up doing, though, is block your bullets from hitting your actual target. It can get extremely frustrating, especially if you're dealing with a large group of enemies at once. There are weapons you can unlock to help with situations like this, but the times where I feel like they'd do a better job than the revolver are few and far between. As a result, dying in these areas means you need to keep throwing yourself at these sections until you can kill every bird. Again, this isn't a problem in and of itself, but the game goes overboard in certain areas with just how many enemies there are. There's also some areas have paths that the game expects you to use to fight these enemies, so if you're not coming from one of those paths, you're kinda screwed. To move away from the negativity, though, situations like this are not even close to the entirety of Laika. For the most part, you're going to dispatch a few obviously set-up enemies in between checkpoints and feel cool as hell for killing them.
Now, the bosses in the game are about half good and half terrible. As in, the first three bosses I fought I really enjoyed, and the last two bosses were some of the worst designed fights I've ever had the displeasure of engaging in. A Hundred Hungry Beaks, A Long Lost Woodcrawler, and A Caterpillar Made Of Sadness were really engaging, fun, badass fights. I have nothing negative to say about them. They exemplify the game's mechanics and provide a challenge to the player with respect to where they're at in the game without leaning into the very easy trap of feeling unfair and overly punishing because Laika dies in one hit. A Gargantuan Swimcrab and Pope Melvia VIII, however, are absolute dumpster fires. Swimcrab involves climbing up a tower doing some platforming, then dodging the crab's bubbles before shooting the bird piloting it. This fight is horribly punishing. If you mess up the platforming, you must restart the whole fight. If you get hit by a pink bubble, you die and must restart the whole fight. If you get hit by a blue bubble, hope and pray to God that you're able to land yourself upright without hitting another bubble. Trying to situate yourself precisely between bubbles is not easy on the motorbike, and shooting the bubbles is risky because you have very limited room to reload your weapons. It's not a fun challenge, the fight is long and the fact it resets after every small mistake just killed so much of the goodwill I had towards the game up until them. It's the worst of Laika encapsulated into one fight. Pope Melvia VIII is a little easier and much less punishing, but still not fun, and has the same problem with spacing and dodging that Swimcrab has. Those two fights are a perfect display of the weaknesses in the game's mechanics and it's surprising to me that they both made it into the final product.
In regards to general exploration and movement, it's about what you'd expect from your average Metroidvania. It's pretty easy to fill out the map very early on since the NPC who sells maps is usually out in the open in the new areas. There's a couple teleportation stations around the map that you can use to make getting around faster, but they require a resource in order to use until you get a certain item. There were times I had no issues with exploration and there were times I found it annoying just how much I had to move through an area without transportation, but I've had experiences like that in Metroidvanias that I think are great if not flawed like Aria of Sorrow and Metroid Prime, so it's not a point against Laika. That's just par for the course for the genre. What isn't par for the course is the lack of movement upgrades. I'm close to the end of the game and the only upgrades I'm aware of are the shotgun, and then a dash which basically makes the shotgun obsolete. The dash is straightforward and feels fine, but the shotgun is just so finnicky to use. I like the idea of using different guns to move around but it just does not feel good to use the shotgun. The lack of movement upgrades also make the game feel stagnant, since you're moving through each area in the exact same way. The new movement options are reserved for extras and secrets or for areas that are explicitly designed around them.
Laika also has resource collection and crafting. This is just my opinion, but I've hated the crafting system in every single game I've played and the best ones are the ones that are as optional and ignorable as possible. While Laika certainly isn't the most egregious perpetrator of locking better weapons behind collecting resources (cough cough dawn of sorrow cough), it's not something I'm particularly fond of. You also need to find blueprints in order to unlock the option to even craft the other weapons, on top of needing to collect the resources themselves. There's also resources specifically for cooking, which gives you boosts for a limited time depending on the food you make. You can get more money for each enemy killed, a longer pull range so you can collect resources and your money sacks from further away, and more ammo space in your weapons. The thing I don't understand, however, is that having more than one parry is also something you can only have from one of these boosts. I don't understand the reasoning behind that, it seems like something you should also be able to upgrade. The parry is extremely useful as a tool in Laika's kit but it's just so silly that you have to make food in order to do it more than once before needing to reload.
The most disappointing part of Laika, though, are the quests. The grand majority of them are fetch quests. You talk to an NPC, they tell you that they want something, you go to an area to find it, then you bring it back to them. The worst part of THAT, is that for a decent chunk of them you literally just need to buy them from a gas station. That also goes for a lot of the more expensive resources, gifts for Puppy, and cassettes. It's so lame, and the rewards really aren't worth it either. You could get more than these quest rewards by just shooting a resource thing. I love doing side quests in games but these are just so disappointing, especially in a world as immersive as Laika's. There's a couple cool ones where you have to kill enemies but for the most part it's just fetch quests.
Finally, I'll go over a few nitpicks I have. I don't like that if you go back to Where We Live after exploring, you NEED to sleep before you can go back out. It's not so pervasive that it gets to become a genuine problem, but it seems strange. Oh God, that boat cutscene. Whose idea was that? 9 minutes long with basically no dialogue, just a ship slooooowllly moving to the left. It was made even more absurd when you could actually control the boat immediately after and it moved at a reasonable speed. That whole area sucked because it was designed around the shotgun.
Overall, I really want to like Laika more than I actually do. It has tons of cool ideas but only a few of them are truly executed well. There's definitely fun to be had, but its weakest parts really hold it back from being anything great. It's hard for me to recommend to most people, but if the game piques your interest in anyway, then you should give it a try.
Starting off with the positives: this game looks amazing. The art, the style, the animations, and the details; they're all very visually appealing. I enjoy the character designs quite a bit, they all complement the world they live in and the details in their animations make interacting with them feel very real.
The game's dialogue can be a little cringeworthy at times. There's definitely an overuse of cursing, but it's not enough to take away from it as an immersive and charming experience. The overall atmosphere of Laika is one that can keep you hooked for quite some time.
The music is good, and I enjoy the unique mechanic behind it playing in theory. In Laika, areas don't have their own themes as you'd expect in other Metroidvanias; instead, your soundtrack is what Laika listens to on her music player and you can expand what songs you hear by discovering cassettes throughout the world. This is a really cool idea in concept, but in execution, it leads to a lot of repetition of the same songs. Eventually I started to play the game without sound on because I got sick of hearing the "oooooh, ooooh, ooohoohoooh" beginning of one song and the rest just got stale. There's also another problem with the system that I'll address further on in the review.
Moving on, I didn't know what to expect when I first heard about this game. I never liked those old motorcycle flash games but I really enjoy Metroidvanias; so a crossover between those two stuck out to me as something I should try. This game, at its best, is so much fun, and some of the most rewarding and enjoyable combat I've experienced in a game of this kind. If you can really master the mechanics, then you're gonna roam the wastelands feeling like a total badass the entire way through. There's a lot of special effects and details that make shooting birds feel extremely cathartic. Shielding yourself from bullets with your bike, parrying bullets, the different types of weapons... there's a lot you can do here to kill enemies and it makes traversing the wasteland feel amazing. I think it's also cool that the game makes you do flips in order to reload your guns and your parry ability. The level design lends itself to those pretty well. However, when you aren't totally owning the game, that's when the drawbacks to the combat system start to drag the game down. You die in a single hit, which isn't a problem in and of itself; there's respawn points EVERYWHERE and the biggest punishment you'll receive is losing money that you have to reclaim from where you died ala Hollow Knight. You also die if you mess up a flip or a landing. This is intentional; respawning after death is addressed in-universe as Laika's family's superpower and you receive achievements for dying a bunch. You're going to die a LOT in Laika. However, enemies will also respawn upon death, and more begin to appear as you progress through the game. Some of these enemies are just so annoying to deal with. There's ones who shoot lock-on missiles that don't lose sight of you, so you need to take out the missile if you have one going after you; there's the ones with the gatling guns that you can't shoot from the front, but my least favorites are the ones who jump out of crates and shoot out like a million kunai in a huge circle around them. I hate those ones not JUST because you only have a small timeframe to shoot them, but because the game tricks you into thinking you can shoot them before their hitbox actually comes out, meaning if you're not paying attention, you're gonna waste a bullet. There's also a mechanic where you can keep shooting enemies after they're dead in order to build up a combo, as well as shoot their weapons to make them fire. All this ends up doing, though, is block your bullets from hitting your actual target. It can get extremely frustrating, especially if you're dealing with a large group of enemies at once. There are weapons you can unlock to help with situations like this, but the times where I feel like they'd do a better job than the revolver are few and far between. As a result, dying in these areas means you need to keep throwing yourself at these sections until you can kill every bird. Again, this isn't a problem in and of itself, but the game goes overboard in certain areas with just how many enemies there are. There's also some areas have paths that the game expects you to use to fight these enemies, so if you're not coming from one of those paths, you're kinda screwed. To move away from the negativity, though, situations like this are not even close to the entirety of Laika. For the most part, you're going to dispatch a few obviously set-up enemies in between checkpoints and feel cool as hell for killing them.
Now, the bosses in the game are about half good and half terrible. As in, the first three bosses I fought I really enjoyed, and the last two bosses were some of the worst designed fights I've ever had the displeasure of engaging in. A Hundred Hungry Beaks, A Long Lost Woodcrawler, and A Caterpillar Made Of Sadness were really engaging, fun, badass fights. I have nothing negative to say about them. They exemplify the game's mechanics and provide a challenge to the player with respect to where they're at in the game without leaning into the very easy trap of feeling unfair and overly punishing because Laika dies in one hit. A Gargantuan Swimcrab and Pope Melvia VIII, however, are absolute dumpster fires. Swimcrab involves climbing up a tower doing some platforming, then dodging the crab's bubbles before shooting the bird piloting it. This fight is horribly punishing. If you mess up the platforming, you must restart the whole fight. If you get hit by a pink bubble, you die and must restart the whole fight. If you get hit by a blue bubble, hope and pray to God that you're able to land yourself upright without hitting another bubble. Trying to situate yourself precisely between bubbles is not easy on the motorbike, and shooting the bubbles is risky because you have very limited room to reload your weapons. It's not a fun challenge, the fight is long and the fact it resets after every small mistake just killed so much of the goodwill I had towards the game up until them. It's the worst of Laika encapsulated into one fight. Pope Melvia VIII is a little easier and much less punishing, but still not fun, and has the same problem with spacing and dodging that Swimcrab has. Those two fights are a perfect display of the weaknesses in the game's mechanics and it's surprising to me that they both made it into the final product.
In regards to general exploration and movement, it's about what you'd expect from your average Metroidvania. It's pretty easy to fill out the map very early on since the NPC who sells maps is usually out in the open in the new areas. There's a couple teleportation stations around the map that you can use to make getting around faster, but they require a resource in order to use until you get a certain item. There were times I had no issues with exploration and there were times I found it annoying just how much I had to move through an area without transportation, but I've had experiences like that in Metroidvanias that I think are great if not flawed like Aria of Sorrow and Metroid Prime, so it's not a point against Laika. That's just par for the course for the genre. What isn't par for the course is the lack of movement upgrades. I'm close to the end of the game and the only upgrades I'm aware of are the shotgun, and then a dash which basically makes the shotgun obsolete. The dash is straightforward and feels fine, but the shotgun is just so finnicky to use. I like the idea of using different guns to move around but it just does not feel good to use the shotgun. The lack of movement upgrades also make the game feel stagnant, since you're moving through each area in the exact same way. The new movement options are reserved for extras and secrets or for areas that are explicitly designed around them.
Laika also has resource collection and crafting. This is just my opinion, but I've hated the crafting system in every single game I've played and the best ones are the ones that are as optional and ignorable as possible. While Laika certainly isn't the most egregious perpetrator of locking better weapons behind collecting resources (cough cough dawn of sorrow cough), it's not something I'm particularly fond of. You also need to find blueprints in order to unlock the option to even craft the other weapons, on top of needing to collect the resources themselves. There's also resources specifically for cooking, which gives you boosts for a limited time depending on the food you make. You can get more money for each enemy killed, a longer pull range so you can collect resources and your money sacks from further away, and more ammo space in your weapons. The thing I don't understand, however, is that having more than one parry is also something you can only have from one of these boosts. I don't understand the reasoning behind that, it seems like something you should also be able to upgrade. The parry is extremely useful as a tool in Laika's kit but it's just so silly that you have to make food in order to do it more than once before needing to reload.
The most disappointing part of Laika, though, are the quests. The grand majority of them are fetch quests. You talk to an NPC, they tell you that they want something, you go to an area to find it, then you bring it back to them. The worst part of THAT, is that for a decent chunk of them you literally just need to buy them from a gas station. That also goes for a lot of the more expensive resources, gifts for Puppy, and cassettes. It's so lame, and the rewards really aren't worth it either. You could get more than these quest rewards by just shooting a resource thing. I love doing side quests in games but these are just so disappointing, especially in a world as immersive as Laika's. There's a couple cool ones where you have to kill enemies but for the most part it's just fetch quests.
Finally, I'll go over a few nitpicks I have. I don't like that if you go back to Where We Live after exploring, you NEED to sleep before you can go back out. It's not so pervasive that it gets to become a genuine problem, but it seems strange. Oh God, that boat cutscene. Whose idea was that? 9 minutes long with basically no dialogue, just a ship slooooowllly moving to the left. It was made even more absurd when you could actually control the boat immediately after and it moved at a reasonable speed. That whole area sucked because it was designed around the shotgun.
Overall, I really want to like Laika more than I actually do. It has tons of cool ideas but only a few of them are truly executed well. There's definitely fun to be had, but its weakest parts really hold it back from being anything great. It's hard for me to recommend to most people, but if the game piques your interest in anyway, then you should give it a try.
Something about this game is way too hard. I had to use cheats to avoid the painSomething about this game is way too hard. I had to use cheats to avoid the pain of reloading. of reloading.
A furry metroidvania with Trials bike gameplay added on top, I was kinda surprised at the lack of on-foot traversal, combat, or just... Walking, in general, but a pretty fun and unique game nonetheless, with a beautiful artstyle
It's a pretty unique spin on the metroidvania genre.
Unfortunately, it's plagued by some of the worst boss fights I've had the misfortune of experiencing. The bird pope was especially bad, but the crab made me outright quit the game.
I don't care for the furry character designs; they could have been human and it wouldn't have changed the story. I didn't really care for the story either. It's gritty and gory, which I like, but there's no substance to it. Even if the ending is good, I'll never see it as the game never gave me a reason to stick around that for that long.
The music was nice, but there's very little variety. I spent so much time listening to the same "sad girl" tracks on repeat that at some point, I had to put on a podcast to replace the music to keep me from losing my mind.
I should have quit this game 2 hours in. I suffered through it for 10 hours. I wanted to finish it, but I'm done. The unskippable 9-minute cutscene of a boat slowly going from right to left was... yeah. I have no words. What were they thinking? This game is soft torture.
It also doesn't run at 60 fps on the Steam deck; it barely reaches 45.
Unfortunately, it's plagued by some of the worst boss fights I've had the misfortune of experiencing. The bird pope was especially bad, but the crab made me outright quit the game.
I don't care for the furry character designs; they could have been human and it wouldn't have changed the story. I didn't really care for the story either. It's gritty and gory, which I like, but there's no substance to it. Even if the ending is good, I'll never see it as the game never gave me a reason to stick around that for that long.
The music was nice, but there's very little variety. I spent so much time listening to the same "sad girl" tracks on repeat that at some point, I had to put on a podcast to replace the music to keep me from losing my mind.
I should have quit this game 2 hours in. I suffered through it for 10 hours. I wanted to finish it, but I'm done. The unskippable 9-minute cutscene of a boat slowly going from right to left was... yeah. I have no words. What were they thinking? This game is soft torture.
It also doesn't run at 60 fps on the Steam deck; it barely reaches 45.