Blood
Laika: Aged Through Blood Review
Laika: Aged Through Blood’s crumbling, post-apocalyptic world is brutal and unforgiving, and it won’t 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’s revolver — all while you’re 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’s even greater than the sum of its parts
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.
I won’t sugarcoat it: You will die a lot — 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’s way too low to the ground. Simply face-planting at 0 mph. Just as the Super Mario series won’t let you get very far without understanding how to jump, Laika doesn’t 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.
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 — 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?
Stunt on These Crows
It’s 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’s meager ammo capacity requires a mid-air backflip, which — aside from looking incredibly badass — goads you into performing daredevil stunts, and gives ample slowed down bullet-time as you aim down the sights before making the kill shot.
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’t 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 — just so long as you remember to land upright. I’m especially glad that Laika’s targeting reticle includes a small arrow depicting your bike’s positioning, which turns bright red when you’re 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.
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.
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’s insistence on using tightropes — which require constant use of wheelies to navigate safely — 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.
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 “Mole Made of Sadness” 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.
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.
Over the course of Laika’s war against the imperialist bird army, you’ll 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’t 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’s way at the last moment.
The other weapons never quite matched the shotgun’s 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’d 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’t reach its full potential.
If Laika had just been about doing sick tricks on a bike and blasting evil, machine gun-wielding birds, I’d 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’re doing. Laika’s character hooked me almost immediately — 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’s not long until you begin to start piecing together Laika’s trauma, as developer Brainwash Gang have leaned into the amount of dying you’ll be doing and made it a core part of her character. Realizing exactly how her “curse” of immortality makes her a warrior hero for her village — not by choice, but by necessity — fundamentally changed how I viewed her blood-soaked journey.
Laika’s relationship with her family was a particular highlight (even when it was heart wrenching). Watching Laika try her best to keep her daughter’s adorable innocence against an increasingly cruel and callous world provided a welcome whiplash between candid, light-hearted moments and punches to the gut, and succeeded in motivating me to search the wastelands for hours to find toys and treats. Juxtaposed against Laika’s aging mother’s insistence (and often hard-hearted approach) on preparing the child for the horrors of war, it was all too easy to get a sense of the impossible burden placed upon Laika. Her journey takes her to some pretty dark places, and it was riveting to see what an immortal coyote warrior is capable of when the safety of her loved ones is on the line.
Your immediate family aren’t the only people to protect in the wasteland, as Laika’s “curse” makes her the best candidate for protector of the aptly named “Where We Live” (every place in this world is named like this and I absolutely love it). Not only is it a peaceful hub to return to after a long day of riding, but it’s full of odd and quirky characters with their own problems and needs. There are plenty of small quests to undertake on behalf of the village’s residents, and as you might expect from an unforgiving world, they don’t always end on a happy note. I was glad to find that the inverse also holds true every so often, with characters making the choice to look towards a spark of hope or fleeting happiness in an otherwise dreadful situation. More than a few quests may feel a bit mundane in terms of having to track down an irrelevant object in the world, but as Laika herself writes in her journal for one such quest, “they’re the difference between living or just surviving.” I can respect that.
Easily the most engaging side quests are those from Laika’s own mother, due in part to the hilarious nature of their dysfunctional relationship, and to the revelations about Laika’s past that shed a lot of painful light on what they’ve gone through thanks to their family’s curse. While I could have likely completed Laika’s journey in just over 10 hours, I was more than happy to continue helping every person in need, getting a literal band back together, and finding every last present for Laika’s dear Puppy before rolling credits after 16 hours (and I’m still missing a weapon!).
