In a world where birds are the top of the food chain, one dog stands up to them by revving her bike and spinning her gun. Are you ready to embark on a quest of revenge, oil and blood across a beautiful hand-drawn western world, while listening to tunes that will break your heart? Let's find out!

Story

You are Laika, an anthropomorphic dog-lady in a western-like, possibly post-apocalyptic, world. All you have to your name are your trusty bike and your family: your mother Maya, you daughter Puppy, her uncle Jakob, and his son Poochie.

The game opens up with Puppy calling you on the walkie-talkie to tell you that Poochie was crucified with his own intestines and that Jakob is off to look for revenge. Yeah, the game is quite brutal. In fact, you get a warning about content regarding violence towards children, sexual assault, and suicide. 


Great conversation starter.

As the game continues, you track down Jakob in the hideout of the main enemy of the game: The Birds. Here, you discover that they've been working on some sort of weapons of mass destruction, and you find Jakob bleeding to death. 

You take his gun and head deeper into the hideout. Eventually, you find the weapon: A mechanical monstrosity with multiple heads that you make short work of. Unfortunately, as you return to Jakob, it's too late. He's already dead.

Fortunately, you can speak with the dead. This allows the two of you to have a final conversation as you ride with his body back at your own hideout. The least he deserves is a proper burial. One you can't offer Poochy, as his body was long gone by the time you got back to it.


"Jakob, you idiot."

Once you get back to the hideout, the game starts to open up into it's metroidvania structure. You'll get a main mission and a few side ones, and off you are into the world.

At first glance, the map looks to be quite large, but keep in mind that you are on a motorcycle, so traversing it should be relatively fast. Most of the world is hidden off, and you'll only be able to unlock it by finding a (very vulgar) vendor that you pay to reveal the area around you.

The demo ends when you bring a specific item to your pup. The in-game clock put my save at around 2 hours, so you get quite a meaty piece of gameplay out of this.

Mechanics

Remember those flash games where you need to ride a motorcycle through rough terrain and you tried not to land on your head during backflips? Most of the game is like that, and it works pretty well... mostly. 

Your main mode of transportation is your motorcycle. You make it move using the left trigger, break with B, and turn around while holding X. Moving the left stick left or right will make the bike lean in that direction, which is how you'll climb certain slopes or rotate your bike. The map has a lot of slopes and jumps, and rotating the bike is quite fast, so you can easily do flips (more on that in a bit).

Overall, traversing the game is enjoyable and the devs managed to translate that type of gameplay into a metroidvania really well. It takes a bit of getting used to (mainly because of muscle memory wanting to use the stick to move and resulting in death by landing on your head), but once you do, it's very fun.


You get to ride over some wild stuff in this game.

Combat is quick and brutal. Both you and your enemies fight with guns, which you fire with the right trigger. Holding it will make Laika enter a bullet time, allowing you to aim with the right stick (there's a degree of auto-aim, if you want it enabled), and releasing the trigger will fire the bullet. Both you and your enemies die in a single shot.

In terms of defense, you can put the bike between you and enemies to block their shots. You can also press X at the right time to deflect their bullets back at them, acting as a sort of parry. Both the parry and the gun are reloaded using flips while in the air, frontflips for the former and backflips for the latter.

There's usually 2 to 5 enemies bundled in a single spot, and you usually have to get them all in succession. It may take a few tries, but managing to kill 2 of them, backflipping for a reload, kill two more, parry the last one, do another backflip to reload again, and landing your bike makes you feel like a badass. Even if you'll land on your head a few times before that.


I did a backflip, shot the bad guy's neck, and saved the day.

Won't lie, you're going to die a lot in this game. Thankfully, there's a lot of checkpoints throughout the map and the reloads are near instant, so getting back in the action isn't so bad. When you die, some of what you collected will be put in a "Satchel" and you'll have to get back to that area to collect it. At the start of the game you have two satchels, so you'll have to die more than twice before permanently losing currency, and there's a good chance that gets upgraded later in the full game.

There are two boss fights in the game, and they follow a similar structure. They'll come out from the side of the screen, while you'll have to jump off ramps and shoot at them and avoid their fire. Do this about a 8 times and you've killed the boss. Not difficult to grasp, and the challenge will come mostly from avoiding their fire and landing on your wheels rather than your neck. They're short and sweet.


First boss, a hybrid between a hydra and a bird. A hybird, if you will.

The game features both a crafting and a cooking component. You'll scour the map for various ingredients and components, then be able to craft new weapons and upgrades back at the base or cook meals with various effect at specific, larger checkpoints (where you'll also be able to teleport). Didn't get to dive too deep in these mechanics during the demo.

Art and Soundtrack

As seen from the screenshots in this article, the game goes for a hand-drawn art style, with some short cinematics sprinkled throughout. This meshes surprisingly well with the more brutal aspects of the story, as it allows for the depiction of some very dark scenes without being overly gross. The backgrounds in particular are great: colorful, striking, conveying a sense of massive scale both indoors and outside.


Pick your tunes!

A real standout is the music. The game features a good chunk of tracks by artist Beícoli, represented in game by cassettes from a character with the same name. You'll find these cassettes in various spots around the map, though the demo seems to start with a number of them already unlocked. The songs are great, fitting well in the western theme of the game while also having a very melancholic tone.

Laika: Aged Through Blood launches tomorrow on Steam, Switch, Xbox and Playstation. What do you think of the game? Will you rev your engine across a desert wasteland while fighting feathered foes? Let us know in the comments below!