Laika: Aged Through Blood

At its core, Laika: Aged Through Blood is a pretty exciting idea. You take the basic formula from the Trials series, balancing a motorbike over bumpy terrain in a 2D perspective. Then you mix in some My Friend Pedro via slow motion mechanics and the ability to reflect enemy projectiles. Then you introduce the innovative system that forces you to do backflips to reload weapons and frontflips to recharge your reflection ability, and then you let the magic happen.

This means that as you move through the game's 2D landscape, you balance your motorbike, aim at enemies in slow-motion and perform flips this and that way to keep up. It's a flow that few other games, aside from My Friend Pedro, have been able to achieve in the past, and when the game is firing on all cylinders (pun intended), it's truly the indie innovation that is perhaps the industry's purest fuel.

Unfortunately, it's not that simple, and in between these sequences of pure gaming magic, there are a number of systems, structures and design decisions that prevent Laika: Aged Through Blood from living up to its full potential.

Laika is set in a post-apocalyptic world where humanity has nuked itself out of existence, leaving only anthropomorphised, mutated animals trying to survive in this harsh new reality. It's Mad Max all the way, and while the game takes its time to build a central motivation for the player, a mother frantically trying to protect her people from the militaristic Birds through a bloody quest for revenge, the set-up works for the most part.

However, the story is too vague, and a bit too drawn out too. This is actually true for the whole of Laika: Aged Through Blood, which presents the player with an open Metroidvania-inspired world that's a lot bigger and a lot wider than you might think, and while it should have lasted a good 10 hours with all of it, the playtime is probably more like double that.

It certainly doesn't matter most of the time though. Firstly, Laika: Aged Through Blood is beautiful to look at, and it's beautiful to look at in the old-fashioned analogue way. Everything looks hand-drawn, hand-moulded, and the environments, the individual cutscenes and all the little details shine. In addition, a soundtrack of individual Mad Max-inspired songs has been put together and looped across the barren plains, and it works brilliantly.

Okay, so a lot of the time you hear the roaring screech of your motorbike, a great track on the cassette recorder and you're smashing Birds in slow motion and bathing in their blood - what's not to like? Well, for one thing, the world is structured in such a confusing way that you're often guessing where you're going and how. Plus, there are so many Birds between you and your goal, Birds that respawn constantly, so the danger is omnipresent, distracting and frustrating when you just want to get where the game wants you to go. Add in a mildly useless map that you have to pay for with the game's central currency, Viscera, and it doesn't get much better.

Furthermore, developer Brainwash Gang couldn't resist adding a bit of Souls structure, so you lose all your Viscera as you die, and you die instantly if you get hit once or fall on your arse off the motorbike. You die often, all the time in fact, and then have to constantly pick up your Viscera and enemies respawn frequently. It may seem like a well-realised desire to challenge players and constantly keep us on the edge of our seats, fair enough, but it ends up being one of the game's biggest annoyances.

But, as I said, some of the time, if not much of the time, it works, and when it works, Laika: Aged Through Blood is top-notch entertainment in prime time, and proof that suddenly there is pure innovation on the indie scene worthy of mainstream attention. It didn't succeed all the way through, which is a shame, because with more fine-tuning of difficulty, enemy placements and perhaps giving the player more life points or "chances" from the start, the whole experience would have been more dynamic. But that shouldn't distract from the fact that Laika: Aged Through Blood is a bloody odyssey of timed and organised action. Well done.