Laika: Aged Through Blood Reviews

10/10 I liked every minute of it, also wept at the end heavy topics so the disclaimer was actually valid for once unique gameplay built around the motorbike controls great art direction and outstanding music P.S.: I had to grind the DIE 1000 TIMES achivement for 30mins (15deaths/min)

An incredible, wonderful story through the badlands The soundtrack is mesmerizing, awesome tracks that you discover the same way your character find them ! The gameplay is quite hard at first, you gotta learn a bit but it's really satisfying once you're able to combo ennemies and flip in the air, dodging and parrying bullets I really felt in love, it's extremely rare to find those kind of game that gave me such hard feelings. I'm even more sad to have finished it now, i never really wanted to leave Laika and Puppy :'( A 10 / 10 for me, i highly recommend you to try it and play it

(26시간 플레이, 도전과제 100%) 넘 재밌었음. 처음 할때만 해도 좀 많이 어렵고, 익숙해질 수 있을까... 싶었는데 조금 더 해보니까 감 잡혀서 플레이 내내 재밌게 했습니다. 이런 조작은 아예 처음인데 너무 푹 빠져버림 개꿀잼 분위기도 설정도 내용도 너무 좋고 특히 게임의 세이브 요소를 게임 내 설정에 녹여내는 게 마음에 듦. 그리고 노래가 진짜 좋았음. 반복적인 행동을 해야 하는 부분에서도 노래 때문에 덜 지루했음. 가끔 게임이 그리워지면 ost 모음 재생할듯... 짧은 플레이 동안 불편했던 점을 찾자면, 먼저 서브퀘스트에서 요구하는 게 뭔지 정확히 알기가 어려운 게 가끔 있었음. (광산 마을로 향하는 부대 처치 = 대체 어디? 이런느낌) 또, 중요한 대사를 넘기면 다시 볼 수 없어서 (대표적으로 '예언' 서브퀘스트.. 퀘스트 탭에서 예언을 찾으라고만 하지 위치를 알려주지 않음..) 만일 서브퀘스트라도 진행하는 데 중요한 내용이면 어떻게든 다시 알 수 있게 해주면 더 좋겠다고 생각함. 위에 쓴 단점이 콩알만하게 느껴질 정도로, 게임 전체는 너무 좋은 경험이었음. 서브퀘도 (내가 아는 한) 전부 깬 것 같은데, 생각할 거리도 많고 아주 재밌었음. 맨 아래 결말 관련 내용을 적을거라, 스포 주의!!! 결말 관련 스포스포스포스포스포스포주의 ========================================================================= ========================================================================= 결말은 후반부 들어서면서 예상이 되는 그대로였는데 물론 너무 좋은 결말이라 생각함. 하지만 개인적으론 아쉬운 점도 있었음. 내 생각에 아쉬운 점은 1. 퍼피가 저주를 이어받는 타이밍이 너무 절묘함 - '막보스 전투'와 '폭탄 터뜨리기' 사이에 정확히 라이카의 저주를 이어받아서 라이카는 폭탄과 함께 사망하게 됨. 그래서 "하필 이때?"하는 생각을 멈출 수가 없었음. 만일 저주가 좀 더 빨리 사라졌으면 싸우다 죽고, 지상은 멸망할 수도 있었고, 저주가 좀만 늦게 사라졌어도 퍼피는 라이카랑 같이 살 수 있었을텐데 (해피엔딩..) 딱 절묘한 타이밍에 저주를 이어받는 바람에 이러한 결말이 나왔음. 물론 주제의식 면에서는 매우 좋은 결말이었지만, 기적적인 확률이었기에 개연성 면에서 살짝 떨어진다고 느낌. 사실 근데 게임 연출상 그래도 됨. 이 상황에서 낼 수 있는 가장 극적인 결말이라 생각함. 그럴수 있지 2. 근데 퍼피가 저주 이어받았으니, 죽은 라이카 영혼과 대화할 수 있을텐데 대화가 안 나옴....... 난 크레딧 끝나고 나올 줄 알았는데... 나오면 좀 별로라서 안 넣은건가? 글쎄.. 그냥 없어서 이대로 끝인게 좀 아쉬웠음 26시간동안 라이카에 몰입하다보니 엔딩이 너무 슬프게 느껴져서 그런지... 위와 같은 생각들이 들었음. 게임은 부모의 희생을 제대로 보여줬지만, 내가 넘 안타까운 마음에 잘 못 받아들이는 것 같음. 주제의식은 너무 좋은데 내가 아직 애시키라서 이런 생각들이 드는듯함 성장해야겠습니다 요약하면 : 좋은 결말인데 너무 슬퍼서 자꾸 다른 생각이 났다 ================================================================== ==================================================================

This game is an exploration of grief. Laika's grief. Her daughter's grief. The grief of those around her. And last but not least, your own grief, whether that's at the somewhat tricky controls or just because the story is making you cry. Not that I wish to make light of the events portrayed in this game of course, but it bears mentioning right at the top: This game is hard to play, and I mean that in all the senses of the word. It's quite difficult, and it's full of very messed up stuff and people doing very messed up things to each other. That content warning almost undersells it, this game doesn't shy away from some deeply upsetting story beats. And it is also hard to play, in a technical sense, because of somewhat clunky controls and a few bosses that are wildly out of place on the difficulty curve. Every boss in the game bar the very last isn't a healthbar to soak so much as it is a puzzle to solve. For the most part this is welcome and interesting right up until it becomes tedious and frustrating. Combat on the whole consists of brief moments of feeling like an incredible badass, buried by a heaping pile of getting whalloped or landing upside down and having to try again for the seventh time. This is ameliorated by the extremely generous distribution of respawn checkpoints. These things are literally everywhere. The end result of Laika's general fragility in combat and generous respawns is that you will get minced repeatedly trying to survive a particular enemy ambush but you will also respawn literally right next to the encounter so you can try again almost immediately. This changes the game from something that would be punishing and unfun to play into something that is difficult but rewarding to play. Again I want to emphasize: the combat is hard, but pulling it off successfully feels incredible and it never stops feeling awesome. I will also note that the game is generally pretty good about ramping up the difficulty level. I don't think I ever had a moment when I hit a skill wall that wasn't one of the two problem bosses, and in all other respects the game raises the difficulty steadily but fairly, both in complexity of terrain navigation and in enemy distribution and increased variety. Finally, I want to repeat: this game is fully of heavy themes. The game opens with of the most gruesome and horrible things I have ever seen in a piece of media, full stop, and leads to a story thread later in the game that, well. It's. I don't really have words for it. It's probably the most upsetting thing I've ever seen in a piece of media. For all the game's expressions of depthless brutality though, it never felt gratuitous. Not a single story beat felt felt out of place or over the top. Only more and more gut wrenching, more and more heart-stopping. I cried something like four or five times across completing this game.

Easily in my top 10 games of all time. Gorgeous art, beautiful music, and an amazing story.

Played through and got every achievement first time through. It took me a bit to get used to the controls (on controller). I am unsure if controller of keyboard is better for this, to be honest. Once I got used to the controls, however, this game was actually amazing. The gameplay extremely fun as well as interesting worldbuilding, characters, and story. Some of the bosses were total bs and infuriated me, but I got through them and still enjoyed the vast majority of the playthrough. I highly, highly recommend checking this one out. If you hate the controls at first, give it time; I hated them for a little bit but got used to them after like an hour and a half or so. Well worth the initial struggle.

A pretty good game that excels in a few areas. I found it really difficult to get used to the controls and was quite frustrated for the first hour or two but eventually got the hang of it. There are few games where just moving wrong will get you killed but that will probably amount to most of your deaths in Laika. It's tricky and punishing but rewarding, and it ends up feeling pretty great when you get the mechanics down. One thing about the movement that I think is a definite flaw is that it can be hard to instinctively tell whether you are about to land on your wheels or if you're about to snap your neck. There is an icon telling you which way you are orientated but its attached to where you aim, not your character. So in the chaos of when you're looking at at enemy, trying to tell when he'll shoot to reflect his bullet, shooting at a different enemy, and you're halfway through a backflip to reload your weapon, your character model becomes a spinning blur that is hard to discern as both your bike and your helmet are white, leading to you misjudging which white splodge you're meant to land on and then dying on impact with the floor. The game is a metroidvania and does it well enough but I don't really know if it needs to be one? There isn't really a reason to explore outside of weapon upgrades and if you have a quest in the area. Sidequests are only there to introduce fun characters, give some tiny bits of lore and give you a meagre reward of materials once completed. After you do the quest, there's probably no reason to visit and talk to that character ever again. Story starts really strong for me but falls off after the opening and never picks back up again. The music is really, really good outside of the boss fights where it just becomes serviceable standard battle music. Easily the best part of the game is the main character, her family and the relationships between them. Learning more about them and listening to their conversations were the most engrossing parts. Not enough changes or happens to them however. There's one big event that happens 2/3 into the game but it's solved fairly quickly. Nothing after that feels as important or as high stakes again and then the game just sort of ends. tl;dr - Tricky but rewarding combat, sort of lacklustre world, fun characters but no development or reason to interact with them more than once most often, quests and story are meh, music is great 90% of the time, protagonist and her family are the best part of the game but aren't developed enough, mediocre ending. 7.5/10

This has been the most disappointed I've been by a game in a while. The idea of mixing MV with biking and shooting was novel. The look of the game as well as the music is great. Also having grown up playing and enjoying Trials games the game nails the feel of the bike and navigating terrain. People also talk about how amazing the story was, It was fine I guess but not groundbreaking like people make it out to be. After a while i was so bored and annoyed by the game I started skipping the dialogue to try and finish the game faster. That's about where the positives end. Theres so many poor gameplay and design decisions the devs it's almost too numerous to count, but let's give it a try. First off, the game should never have been a MV, it literally adds 0 to the game and only serves to pad game length due to excessive backtracking, but not for finding secrets and upgrades, just for navigating the game. This doesn't help due to way too few and sporadic fast travel points. Also the pointless need to find a guy to uncover the map in each area is another mistake that just adds more annoyance. You uncover like 3-4 guns total, and things like shotgun are mostly used for traversal, so 90% of the game will be using the pistol. You get 1 total ability, the dash, not until the last 10% of the game which is the most brainless decision ever, because that's the only thing over my 25 hrs of gameplay that added any depth or variety. All the weapon upgrades are just" 1 more shot" or "reload with slightly less of a flip" and don't change anything. Also it makes 0 sense the machine gun has to shoot all bullets at once, you cant fire them single fire as you normally would. Then theres the mechanics. Flipping sometimes doesn't reload, autoaim doesnt always work, and drift turning sometimes doesn't work, but all of these are very sporadic. Sometimes also you can't tell if the shot is going to hit your bike or not leading to unwanted deaths. The game just tries to do too much. The flipping to reload is one of the worst decisions I've ever seen. This leads to you shooting 2 shots, then being on the ground having to try and drive away to try and find somewhere to flip, but more often then not leads to you just getting killed. This also slows the action and fluidity of combat to a crawl and breaks up the momentum. Switching weapons is supper finicky in the moment needing to use directional buttons while navigating with your character. Then theres the death system. You die in 1 hit, and theres a reason no MV in their right mind would ever make such a stupid decision, especially in a game where you can also die from falling or hitting the ground. This forces CONSTANT trial in error in tons of parts. This isn't helped by when you die every single person you killed respawns, including prior to hitting the checkpoint. You just have to fight multiple fights before getting to the part you want to. Then you lose HALF your money on every death as its trying to rip off dark souls, but since everything respawns you'll likely die multiple times getting back to your body leading to tons of lost currency. Theres a reason dark souls doesn't have 1 hit kills. This is further aggravated by the game zooming out during aiming and battles, leading to having difficulty seeing if you're facing the right way when you land. Also because you have to navigate aiming, flipping to reload, dodging bullets, and landing right up, theres just too much to pay attention to leading to countless deaths from information overload on screen, which goes against the 1 hit death model. Theres also only a single parry charge for some reason, forcing you to do more flips in a different direction just to reload that. There are times where you go up a jump and you are getting shot at all sides and you have to try and kill everyone while parrying and flipping to reload leading to countless deaths from almost unwinnable situations. You get almost no upgrades, just some cooking that gives partial buffs for 15 min, because of course you wouldn't get more parries naturally. All weapons and upgrades require way too many crafting mats. Exploration provides no benefit besides boring crafting mats. Theres no waypoints or indicators for quests, leading to constant driving around lost looking for things. There's no information on main quest vs side quests as the UI just has a random jumble of quests listed. Side quests usually provide no benefit, and at most some random crafting mats. The more you play you realize this game feels the MV was shoehorned in and then they just ripped off from hotline miami and darksouls for specific designs, and none of those genre's work well together for a reason. The boss fights are some of the worst designed I've ever seen, usually all gimmicky involving instant death pits, doing platforming in chase scenes while shooting and dodging and flipping during multiple phases all while getting hit once and starting over from scratch. The crab boss is a special mention for horrible design, although the final boss of the game was actually designed well and how more bosses should have been. It's fun at first flipping through the air and shooting guys in slow-mo with the pistol, but as thats 95% of what you do since the game adds nothing as you play until the very end, it gets tired 20% through the game and then they just pad it with unnecessary backtracking. The fact that none of the systems work together and seem only designed to be as annoying as possible and force you to die and repeat most sections of the game is infuriating rather than fun. It doesn't feel like Megaman where you get better and each death feels like your fault and it was a mistake. This game feels like you're dying while fighting the poorly implemented game systems. Its also just boring and repetitive so theres not much payoff for all your blood sweat and tears. I honestly can't see how anyone could enjoy this game, as someone whos played 90% of all popular MV's has seen almost all of this done better can attest. 5.5/10.

This was honestly one of the most disappointing games I've ever played. Great art and soundtrack ruined by the most frustrating gameplay I've ever experienced. I've really tried to stick with it, but after playing for 5 hours, I realized I'm just not having fun. I was actively annoyed and frustrated instead. Seeing how big a section of the map I gotta explore just felt like a chore. I really liked the concept of driving a bike while shooting guns, but you get killed by every small thing in this game. Every minor slip-up and you get reset. Fail to pay attention for half a second, and you've flipped over. Worse, there are plenty of moments when it's tough to see which orientation your bike even is because of everything else happening. When I looked at the game's preview, I expected a smooth and fast-paced gameplay where you ride high and get bathed in the blood of your enemies, but the reality is the opposite. You die and reset every minute. You constantly check your map to know where to go. It resulted in a very slow and sluggish experience instead. If this game at least gave you multiple lives instead of one, it would already solve my biggest issue. I want to keep riding, but every single time, the game just kills any momentum of the gameplay. One-hit kills for both you and the enemy just make the game feel like a "Do this sequence perfectly" puzzle rather than an actual combat. This feels the worst with bosses. Long and stretched-out sequences where you need to perform the same thing perfectly, rather than having an actual fight. Another issue I had was the map merchant. This just felt very unnecessary. I would have preferred if the map had just been charted as I moved through it. That would have given a better sense of exploration. Instead, what often happens is you'd keep moving through a blank portion of the map until you find the npc to reveal the whole section. Many of the design choices for the game felt like they were made to actively slow down the experience, which is contradictory to its premise, like how there are unskippable story sections where you need to hold the forward button, or the fact that you have a limited teleport and must craft an item for it. It felt like the devs were forcing you to appreciate the world and story they crafted, deterring you from enjoying the fun gameplay you wanted. A lot of the elements in the game just felt at odds with one another. I recognize that this is merely a personal preference, as I'm in the minority, but I've no doubts that even for those who liked this game, it could still have been better if the gameplay weren't so frustrating.

After completing Laika and getting all the achievements, I must say it's a very beautiful and tricky game to learn. The main mechanic of rotating your motorcycle and shooting is hard to master and even after 20 hours of playing I often hit my head on something, but the feeling of successfully blocking, reloading and parrying is very satisfying. I was playing on the controller and the absolute chaos of trying to rotate and shoot at the same time was the best part of the game. The music is great too. It really elevates the feeling of a journey and, somehow, the slow tunes of Beicoli help you focus and stay calm. The sprites, backgrounds and graphics overall are just stunning. To tell you how great this game looks, I will say I have a new wallpaper. And they are just amazing. Three main disadvantages to this amazing game are: 1. Bosses are weak. While playing, I had this feeling the bosses were too simple or just not hard. More moves and a higher tempo of the battles would help them a lot. 2. The story. I like it, it's not bad per se, but I feel it could be a little better. I like the message of the game, how the story flows, but I have this feeling there could be more. It's a hard feeling to explain, but if you play the game, you will know. 3. 1000 deaths achievement. I beat the last boss and got every other achievement in less than 500 deaths. To be honest with you, the next 40 minutes of my life weren't very engaging. To sum up everything, it's not a perfect game, but if you decide to buy it and play it, it will be worth the investment. To this day, I've been thinking about this game and listening to the amazingly made music tracks. Tl;dr - spin to win