Laika: Aged Through Blood

Easily one of the best games I've played. Love how they took the motorcycle flash game experience and made it soulcrushing :3

Laika: Aged Through Blood Overall: 8/10 Music: 10/10 Story: 10/10 Gameplay: 4/10 (There's more to this, so hang on) Visuals: 10/10 I know that this game is a little over three years old, but it's a metroidvania and it was on sale, so it's not like I'm not going to play it. To preface: this game is incredibly sad, incredibly gutwrenching, and it hits the ground running with the emotional sucker-punches. But it's one of the most beautiful explorations of grief, vengeance, and the responsibilities we have to those that we love. Laika is a coyote, she rides a dirtbike, and she's a total badass. When I say "coyote," I mean an actual anthropomorphised coyote. Everyone in the game is an anthropomorphised animal of some variety. The game begins, and it's set up that the Birds are an imperialist, fascist, genocidal society bent on wiping the world clean of all mammals. And they are really damn good at it. Immediately, you're faced with grisly aftermath of a murder, specifically a child from your village. Over your radio, your daughter occasionally chimes in and Laika has brief exposition dialogs with her, which are done incredibly well and aren't hamfisted in. Throughout the course of the story, you're faced with people whose lives were torn apart or wholesale taken by the Birds. You encounter characters that you end up loving or end up hating, and Laika herself voices her own very strong opinions on them. I don't want to spoil anything here, but just know that there are immensely heavy themes and moments in this game that made me gasp and brought me to the verge of tears. We all want a mom like Laika. The core mechanics of the game center around the dirt bike. You will spend 95% of the game on your dirt bike. Even after getting the game's first weapon, a revolver, you are going to have to use the dirtbike to reload. By doing a backflip, you reload your gun. By doing a frontflip, you recharge your ability to parry bullets with your freaking dirtbike. This may sound absurd, and it really is, but there's no feeling like gunning down a group of evil birds while doing sick tricks in bullet time. My main gripes amongst what I would consider really fun and really interested mechanics have to be when those mechanics don't exactly work too well. If you flip your bike over, you die. If Laika makes contact with a single bullet, a floor, a wall, she dies. On the surface, that sounds punishing, but the game does provide you with ample checkpoints to make it a teensy bit frustrating. However, there are sections where you have to hold a wheelie for traversal in the main story. With how awkward the actual physics can be, that means you either fall through the rope that you're crossing, or you accidentally flip over and die. Some of the boss fights, while they're all pretty dang cool, suffer from the same problems. You may be ascending a lighthouse while fighting a Metal Slug style crab boss, but lord help you if you tilt a little too much in very specific (yet easy to hit) spots. Take my score with a grain of salt, though. Someone out there has to be really good at it, and this may be a Skill Issue on my end. Visually, this game is immaculate. The setting, a vast wasteland, may have some drab colors and uninteresting vistas, but they're executed in a manner that fully fits the setting. Partway through, you find the site at which an unexploded nuclear bomb has fallen, leading to the understanding that the Birds have tried very hard to erase all life in the region. Still, just a couple of area transitions away, you find all kinds of flora, and striking scenery. The art direction is tight, it's impactful, and I can't complain about a single thing. Character designs and animations are flawless and truly interesting, and the designs of the bosses and different enemy types are pretty cool. As for the sound design and music, I have very little to say. The game says it all itself. The soundtrack for the game is an entire album produced by a member of the development studio, and it is both haunting and tear-inducing at times. What makes it better, you actually unlock more of the soundtrack by finding cassettes scattered throughout the world. At first, you may hear the same few songs, but they never feel stale. Seriously, check out Beicoli, the artist, and her work. All in all, TL;DR, you should play Laika: Aged Through Blood.

Достойная переделка Elasto Mania.

Pretty solid game, I liked it The movement and combat can take some getting used to but it can feel really good styling on the enemies and stuff. The art direction and soundtrack are really great, I think they do a really good job of setting the atmosphere. You can pick up Cassettes along the way which unlock music to play during gameplay, and they're all good vibes while driving through the wastelands The story and characters are fairly basic, but it does a good job of getting you to care about them I think.

I finally got to lock in and finish this fantastic experience. Well I can confirm that this game is likely not for everyone. It's a fantastic metroidvania mixed with Excitebike and solid gunplay. The story is actually excellent and the soundtrack is one for the books. That said, some of the boss design and enemy placement can get incredibly annoying at times. The hook shot ability is relatively useless and while side quests help build out the world, their rewards kind of stink for all the effort it requires. Also the reliance on expendable resources to fast travel with as large as the map is feels like a bit of an oversight especially with fast travel locations being very few and far between. All told even with all of my criticisms I would still rate this at around an 8.5 out of 10.

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