{"id":37207,"date":"2023-10-19T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-19T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.xtremeservers.com\/blog\/laika-aged-through-blood-review\/"},"modified":"2023-10-19T14:00:00","modified_gmt":"2023-10-19T13:00:00","slug":"laika-aged-through-blood-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xtremeservers.com\/blog\/laika-aged-through-blood-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Laika: Aged Through Blood Review"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Laika: Aged Through Blood\u2019s crumbling, post-apocalyptic world is brutal and unforgiving, and it won\u2019t give you many chances to forget that. Its pain and anguish is told through a story of reluctant revenge and desperate survival, heard in the mournful lyrics of its impeccable soundtrack and blasted through the barrel of the titular character\u2019s revolver \u2014 all while you\u2019re flipping through the air on a motorcycle and coating the wasteland in viscera. Though a bit more punishing than it needs to be at times, Laika manages to brilliantly meld its satisfying combat, beautiful music, and heartfelt story into a dazzling, bloody action game that\u2019s even greater than the sum of its parts<\/p>\n

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Laika puts a clever spin on the 2D side scrolling metroidvania, as almost all of your exploration is done while riding a rugged motorbike across dangerous terrain. Whether growling along broken highways, zooming up the trunks of mighty trees, or doing loops along old rusted pipes, Laika makes smart use of balance-focused bike physics reminiscent of the Trials series. It routinely finds fun twists in its level design that challenge you in unexpected ways by driving through places no bike was meant to go, all while testing your abilities to quickly adapt to eliminating threats while still landing dangerous jumps. <\/p>\n

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I won\u2019t sugarcoat it: You will die a lot \u2014 and a good amount of that may stem from mishandling your bike so badly that embarrassment became the real cause of death. Leaning back too far while trying to pop a rad wheelie. Attempting to do a sick spin off a ramp that\u2019s way too low to the ground. Simply face-planting at 0 mph. Just as the Super Mario series won\u2019t let you get very far without understanding how to jump, Laika doesn\u2019t pull any punches with its insistence that you truly respect its physics, which means being on constant alert to reposition your bike after every jump, ramp, and incline even when under constant fire from multiple threats.<\/p>\n

I won\u2019t sugarcoat it: You will die a lot.<\/section>\n

This may sound like a terribly un-fun disaster, and it very well could have been if not for the vital ways Laika softens its blows. Checkpoints are spaced rather mercifully, being both opt-in and never too far from each other to get you right back into gear moments after a grisly death. It also deviates from the usual playbook of losing all of your bloody viscera currency on death by only dropping a chunk of that total instead, allowing you to die more than once and still reclaim your lost goods \u2014 and even upgrade the amount of bags your currency is split between on death. In these ways, dying feels less like an aggravating setback and more like a quick reset on a particularly violent puzzle standing before you: Just how do you launch off three successive ramps, kill every enemy in your way, and land safely at the end?<\/p>\n

Stunt on These Crows<\/h3>\n

It\u2019s when you solve these encounters that Laika shows how well it delivers on its promise. Soaring through the air, picking off assailants in quick succession while backflipping and parrying incoming bullets, before landing in an outrageous pool of blood feels like a mesmerizingly brutal ballet. Combat is so intrinsically tied to bike movement and handling that one cannot fully exist without the other. Even the act of reloading your weapon\u2019s meager ammo capacity requires a mid-air backflip, which \u2014 aside from looking incredibly badass \u2014 goads you into performing daredevil stunts, and gives ample slowed down bullet-time as you aim down the sights before making the kill shot. <\/p>\n

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The titular coyote Laika is what you might consider a glass hand cannon: able to deliver one-hit kills with impunity, but always one stray bullet away from respawning at a checkpoint. Developer Brainwash Gang isn\u2019t so cruel as to not give you a fighting chance with some great additional tactical features, though. A quick tap to drift your bike can block incoming hits, in addition to a single reflective parry that can be recharged via a frontflip (adding another layer of split-second decision making to your daredevil moves). Tilting your bike also allows incoming bullets to bounce harmlessly off the bottom \u2014 just so long as you remember to land upright. I\u2019m especially glad that Laika\u2019s targeting reticle includes a small arrow depicting your bike\u2019s positioning, which turns bright red when you\u2019re poised to land badly. Considering how frantic encounters can get with bullets, blood, and explosions everywhere, being able to focus on both your targeting and positioning in the same glance (and using slowed time to help correct both) is an incredibly smart move that helped me avoid a lot of scenarios that would have slammed the brakes on certain victory.<\/p>\n

Despite taking place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Laika: Aged Through Blood offers a great variety of terrain to ride through with some exceptional hand painted backdrops alongside interesting challenges in its level design. Zig-zagging up the mountain switchbacks of Where Iron Caresses the Sky felt worlds apart from navigating the scrap heaps and toxic pits of Where Rust Weaves, as skidding over crumbling junk threatened to keep me off balance while fending off gun-toting birds. In true metroid(motor?)vania style, the lands I explored would routinely branch out and interconnect in new ways, leading to certain condensed regions that reminded me more of Zelda dungeons than anything else. <\/p>\n

Combat is intrinsically tied to bike movement and handling.<\/section>\n

Riding a motorbike through broken, rusted ships or ominous temples should feel different than the open road, and Laika absolutely nails this change of pace with tighter rooms teeming with increased enemy placements that had me carefully considering who to target first. I was also impressed with how adept the camera was at zooming out at the right times to give me a brief heads up of the dangers to come, or expanding the field of view for a particularly challenging room to fit the entire screen. Most of these dungeon areas provided some fun challenges like navigating volatile gravity-defying air vents, or crashing down entire floors to create new paths. That being said, the ship area\u2019s insistence on using tightropes \u2014 which require constant use of wheelies to navigate safely \u2014 felt like it was starting to ask too much, requiring me to manage its often erratic balancing rope physics while enemies were also trying to kill me.<\/p>\n

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Along with dungeons, Laika has its share of towering (and often grotesque) boss fights. Both visually striking and imposing, I found the different arenas these enemies dwell in to be inventive and entertaining. While some fights involve navigating half-pipe rooms or halls to quickly reload between strikes, the constantly moving sections easily proved to be the most fun. Getting to outrun a giant \u201cMole Made of Sadness\u201d while dodging missiles until the perfect opportunity to perform a cinematic midair shot to its exposed weak point was consistently a blast. Bosses like the mole, or having to climb a lighthouse tower ahead of an armored crab, were a great example of showcasing the best blend of bike handling and combat in a gauntlet of obstacles. <\/p>\n

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However, with some bosses having very long sections between chances to damage them, and any death putting you right back at the start, it sometimes got a little aggravating when a small mistake was costing me several minutes to claw my way back to that last sliver of boss health. Adding the fact that one particular boss arena was incredibly small, featured a single tiny hump to flip off and reload, with gutters to fall through in each corner, and also bullet hell of projectiles to avoid or scramble to shoot, it began to feel like the developer was throwing just a few too many obstacles for me to deal with at once.<\/p>\n

Over the course of Laika\u2019s war against the imperialist bird army, you\u2019ll have the chance to get a few much needed weapons and upgrades that sometimes unlocked areas I had driven past wondering how to approach. The shotgun was perhaps the most unexpected and useful of them all, with the kick from its knockback being powerful enough to provide short hops over terrain where ramps weren\u2019t readily available. I loved how it opened up some incredible risks in combat depending on how I utilized it; it was able to either kill all of my momentum at the worst time, provide increased airtime to reload, or even dodge incoming projectiles by knocking me out of harm\u2019s way at the last moment. <\/p>\n

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The other weapons never quite matched the shotgun\u2019s tier of usefulness, but I very much appreciated how each weapon handled and fired slightly differently, and upgrading their ammo capacity or the degree of spin needed to reload made for a very worthwhile endeavor. I only wish the hookshot upgrade could have been nearly as useful, as I soon found it could only attach to extremely specific targets for one side quest and a single dungeon. It felt very much like one of those items you\u2019d find in a Zelda game used to complete the dungeon and then never needed again, and not being able to use it to grab onto enemies, resources, or ledges felt like it didn\u2019t reach its full potential.<\/p>\n

If Laika had just been about doing sick tricks on a bike and blasting evil, machine gun-wielding birds, I\u2019d still probably think it was a good game. What really puts it on a higher level is how well its story flows alongside everything you\u2019re doing. Laika\u2019s character hooked me almost immediately \u2014 a coyote mother with a bike and gun who witnesses the aftermath of the savage murder of her people, and her first instinct is to try and avoid an all-out war? It\u2019s not long until you begin to start piecing together Laika\u2019s trauma, as developer Brainwash Gang have leaned into the amount of dying you\u2019ll be doing and made it a core part of her character. Realizing exactly how her \u201ccurse\u201d of immortality makes her a warrior hero for her village \u2014 not by choice, but by necessity \u2014 fundamentally changed how I viewed her blood-soaked journey.<\/p>\n