At its core, Laika: Aged Through Blood is a very exciting idea. You take the basic formula from the Trials series, balancing a motorcycle on rough terrain from a 2D perspective. You can then mix in some My Friend Pedro with slow-motion mechanics and the ability to reflect enemy projectiles. Then you introduce an innovative system that forces you to do backflips to reload your weapon and frontflips to replenish your reflexes, and then you make the magic happen.
This means that as you move around the game’s 2D landscape, you can balance your motorcycle, target enemies in slow motion, and perform flips this and that to keep up. With the exception of My Friend Pedro, few other games in the past have been able to achieve this kind of flow, and when a game goes all out (pun intended), true indie innovation is probably the purest fuel in the industry.
Unfortunately, things aren’t that simple, and between these sequences of pure gameplay magic, there are a number of systems, structural and design decisions that prevent Laika: Aged Through Blood from reaching its full potential.
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Laika is set in a post-apocalyptic world where humanity has ceased to exist, leaving only anthropomorphic mutant animals trying to survive in this harsh new reality. It’s Mad Max from beginning to end, and while the game takes its time to establish a core motivation for the player, a mother frantically trying to protect her people from the militaristic Birds in a bloody retaliation, the setting is largely Effective.
However, the story is too vague and a bit too drawn out. This actually applies to the entirety of Laika: Aged Through Blood, which offers players an open Metroidvania-style world that’s much bigger and wider than you might imagine, and while it’s supposed to last 10 hours, But the game time is probably more like twice that.
But of course that doesn’t matter most of the time. First off, Laika: Aged Through Blood looks beautiful, and it looks beautiful in an old-fashioned analogy way. Everything looks hand-drawn and hand-shaped, with environments, individual cutscenes and all the little details shining through. Additionally, a soundtrack of a Mad Max-inspired song has been put together and played in a loop across the barren plains to great effect.
Okay, so a lot of the time you hear the roaring screams of motorcycles, a great track on the cassette player, you’re smashing Birds in slow motion and bathing in their blood – what’s not to like? Well, for one, the structure of the world is so confusing that you’re constantly guessing where you’re going and how to get there. Plus, there are a lot of Birds between you and your goal, and Birds constantly respawn, so danger is everywhere, which can be distracting and frustrating when you’re just trying to get to where the game wants you to be. Throw in a slightly useless map that you have to pay with Viscera, the game’s central currency, and it doesn’t get any better.
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Additionally, developer Brainwash Gang couldn’t help but add some Souls structures, so you lose all your Viscera when you die, and if you get hit once or fall off your motorcycle and land on your ass, you die instantly. You die often, all the time in fact, and then have to constantly pick up your Viscera, with enemies constantly respawning. This seems like a desire to challenge players and constantly keep us on the edge of our seats, which is fair enough, but it ends up being one of the game’s biggest annoyances.
But, as I said, there are times, if not a lot of times, when it works, and when it works, Laika: Aged Through Blood is top-tier primetime entertainment and proves that there’s a sudden surge in the indie scene that’s pure innovation worthy of mainstream attention. . It’s a shame that it doesn’t succeed all the way, because the whole experience would be more dynamic with more fine-tuning of difficulty, enemy placement, and possibly giving players more life points or “opportunities” from the start. But that shouldn’t distract from the fact that Laika: Aged Through Blood is a bloody journey about timed and organized action. here you go.
