Definitely, this game was a surprise for me. I had only seen the trailer and bought the game on a steam sale.

Besides the game's art being absurdly beautiful, the OST is one of the best things I've ever heard while playing something.

The mechanic of doing everything on a motorcycle at first seemed very difficult to me, but with time and with the assists the game gives you, like allowing you to bump your head on some things, everything becomes very fluid and natural.

The story is quite interesting; the world reveals itself to be more than just a "mad max" with animals, and it captivated me a lot, both the characters and the plot as a whole.

As a metroidvania, I liked it a lot. I think there could be more places to teleport to in such a horizontal world, but overall, it does everything that a satisfying metroidvania does.

The weapons have a good variety, with noticeable differences, and I noticed that I wasn't penalized for not using the ones I didn't like. It was clear that some would help me more in certain moments, but the fact that I could use any of them as a primary weapon left me satisfied. Another point I liked is that unlike other games, in this one, the initial weapon isn't left aside because the new ones are much better. I used the first weapon the whole game, just having to upgrade it, and it was very good. Another cool point is that the shotgun changes the gameplay, allowing you to reach previously inaccessible places.

The boss fights and enemy encounters are well balanced; the enemies have a small variety, but as you progress, they spread throughout the map, changing the environment.

Overall, I liked it a lot. A very natural and fun resource system, cooking gives significant improvements but not using them doesn't harm you, the gameplay is great, it has memorable areas, captivating characters, a good story, a wonderful OST—I highly recommend it!

There won't be any plot spoilers in this review but I will mention certain items necessary for progression and non-contextualized moments throughout the game. I have not finished the game yet and plan on doing so, but I'm close to the end.

Starting off with the positives: this game looks amazing. The art, the style, the animations, and the details; they're all very visually appealing. I enjoy the character designs quite a bit, they all complement the world they live in and the details in their animations make interacting with them feel very real.
The game's dialogue can be a little cringeworthy at times. There's definitely an overuse of cursing, but it's not enough to take away from it as an immersive and charming experience. The overall atmosphere of Laika is one that can keep you hooked for quite some time.

The music is good, and I enjoy the unique mechanic behind it playing in theory. In Laika, areas don't have their own themes as you'd expect in other Metroidvanias; instead, your soundtrack is what Laika listens to on her music player and you can expand what songs you hear by discovering cassettes throughout the world. This is a really cool idea in concept, but in execution, it leads to a lot of repetition of the same songs. Eventually I started to play the game without sound on because I got sick of hearing the "oooooh, ooooh, ooohoohoooh" beginning of one song and the rest just got stale. There's also another problem with the system that I'll address further on in the review.

Moving on, I didn't know what to expect when I first heard about this game. I never liked those old motorcycle flash games but I really enjoy Metroidvanias; so a crossover between those two stuck out to me as something I should try. This game, at its best, is so much fun, and some of the most rewarding and enjoyable combat I've experienced in a game of this kind. If you can really master the mechanics, then you're gonna roam the wastelands feeling like a total badass the entire way through. There's a lot of special effects and details that make shooting birds feel extremely cathartic. Shielding yourself from bullets with your bike, parrying bullets, the different types of weapons... there's a lot you can do here to kill enemies and it makes traversing the wasteland feel amazing. I think it's also cool that the game makes you do flips in order to reload your guns and your parry ability. The level design lends itself to those pretty well. However, when you aren't totally owning the game, that's when the drawbacks to the combat system start to drag the game down. You die in a single hit, which isn't a problem in and of itself; there's respawn points EVERYWHERE and the biggest punishment you'll receive is losing money that you have to reclaim from where you died ala Hollow Knight. You also die if you mess up a flip or a landing. This is intentional; respawning after death is addressed in-universe as Laika's family's superpower and you receive achievements for dying a bunch. You're going to die a LOT in Laika. However, enemies will also respawn upon death, and more begin to appear as you progress through the game. Some of these enemies are just so annoying to deal with. There's ones who shoot lock-on missiles that don't lose sight of you, so you need to take out the missile if you have one going after you; there's the ones with the gatling guns that you can't shoot from the front, but my least favorites are the ones who jump out of crates and shoot out like a million kunai in a huge circle around them. I hate those ones not JUST because you only have a small timeframe to shoot them, but because the game tricks you into thinking you can shoot them before their hitbox actually comes out, meaning if you're not paying attention, you're gonna waste a bullet. There's also a mechanic where you can keep shooting enemies after they're dead in order to build up a combo, as well as shoot their weapons to make them fire. All this ends up doing, though, is block your bullets from hitting your actual target. It can get extremely frustrating, especially if you're dealing with a large group of enemies at once. There are weapons you can unlock to help with situations like this, but the times where I feel like they'd do a better job than the revolver are few and far between. As a result, dying in these areas means you need to keep throwing yourself at these sections until you can kill every bird. Again, this isn't a problem in and of itself, but the game goes overboard in certain areas with just how many enemies there are. There's also some areas have paths that the game expects you to use to fight these enemies, so if you're not coming from one of those paths, you're kinda screwed. To move away from the negativity, though, situations like this are not even close to the entirety of Laika. For the most part, you're going to dispatch a few obviously set-up enemies in between checkpoints and feel cool as hell for killing them.

Now, the bosses in the game are about half good and half terrible. As in, the first three bosses I fought I really enjoyed, and the last two bosses were some of the worst designed fights I've ever had the displeasure of engaging in. A Hundred Hungry Beaks, A Long Lost Woodcrawler, and A Caterpillar Made Of Sadness were really engaging, fun, badass fights. I have nothing negative to say about them. They exemplify the game's mechanics and provide a challenge to the player with respect to where they're at in the game without leaning into the very easy trap of feeling unfair and overly punishing because Laika dies in one hit. A Gargantuan Swimcrab and Pope Melvia VIII, however, are absolute dumpster fires. Swimcrab involves climbing up a tower doing some platforming, then dodging the crab's bubbles before shooting the bird piloting it. This fight is horribly punishing. If you mess up the platforming, you must restart the whole fight. If you get hit by a pink bubble, you die and must restart the whole fight. If you get hit by a blue bubble, hope and pray to God that you're able to land yourself upright without hitting another bubble. Trying to situate yourself precisely between bubbles is not easy on the motorbike, and shooting the bubbles is risky because you have very limited room to reload your weapons. It's not a fun challenge, the fight is long and the fact it resets after every small mistake just killed so much of the goodwill I had towards the game up until them. It's the worst of Laika encapsulated into one fight. Pope Melvia VIII is a little easier and much less punishing, but still not fun, and has the same problem with spacing and dodging that Swimcrab has. Those two fights are a perfect display of the weaknesses in the game's mechanics and it's surprising to me that they both made it into the final product.

In regards to general exploration and movement, it's about what you'd expect from your average Metroidvania. It's pretty easy to fill out the map very early on since the NPC who sells maps is usually out in the open in the new areas. There's a couple teleportation stations around the map that you can use to make getting around faster, but they require a resource in order to use until you get a certain item. There were times I had no issues with exploration and there were times I found it annoying just how much I had to move through an area without transportation, but I've had experiences like that in Metroidvanias that I think are great if not flawed like Aria of Sorrow and Metroid Prime, so it's not a point against Laika. That's just par for the course for the genre. What isn't par for the course is the lack of movement upgrades. I'm close to the end of the game and the only upgrades I'm aware of are the shotgun, and then a dash which basically makes the shotgun obsolete. The dash is straightforward and feels fine, but the shotgun is just so finnicky to use. I like the idea of using different guns to move around but it just does not feel good to use the shotgun. The lack of movement upgrades also make the game feel stagnant, since you're moving through each area in the exact same way. The new movement options are reserved for extras and secrets or for areas that are explicitly designed around them.

Laika also has resource collection and crafting. This is just my opinion, but I've hated the crafting system in every single game I've played and the best ones are the ones that are as optional and ignorable as possible. While Laika certainly isn't the most egregious perpetrator of locking better weapons behind collecting resources (cough cough dawn of sorrow cough), it's not something I'm particularly fond of. You also need to find blueprints in order to unlock the option to even craft the other weapons, on top of needing to collect the resources themselves. There's also resources specifically for cooking, which gives you boosts for a limited time depending on the food you make. You can get more money for each enemy killed, a longer pull range so you can collect resources and your money sacks from further away, and more ammo space in your weapons. The thing I don't understand, however, is that having more than one parry is also something you can only have from one of these boosts. I don't understand the reasoning behind that, it seems like something you should also be able to upgrade. The parry is extremely useful as a tool in Laika's kit but it's just so silly that you have to make food in order to do it more than once before needing to reload.

The most disappointing part of Laika, though, are the quests. The grand majority of them are fetch quests. You talk to an NPC, they tell you that they want something, you go to an area to find it, then you bring it back to them. The worst part of THAT, is that for a decent chunk of them you literally just need to buy them from a gas station. That also goes for a lot of the more expensive resources, gifts for Puppy, and cassettes. It's so lame, and the rewards really aren't worth it either. You could get more than these quest rewards by just shooting a resource thing. I love doing side quests in games but these are just so disappointing, especially in a world as immersive as Laika's. There's a couple cool ones where you have to kill enemies but for the most part it's just fetch quests.

Finally, I'll go over a few nitpicks I have. I don't like that if you go back to Where We Live after exploring, you NEED to sleep before you can go back out. It's not so pervasive that it gets to become a genuine problem, but it seems strange. Oh God, that boat cutscene. Whose idea was that? 9 minutes long with basically no dialogue, just a ship slooooowllly moving to the left. It was made even more absurd when you could actually control the boat immediately after and it moved at a reasonable speed. That whole area sucked because it was designed around the shotgun.

Overall, I really want to like Laika more than I actually do. It has tons of cool ideas but only a few of them are truly executed well. There's definitely fun to be had, but its weakest parts really hold it back from being anything great. It's hard for me to recommend to most people, but if the game piques your interest in anyway, then you should give it a try.

Given how many hundreds of Metroidvania games have come out at this point, it feels almost inevitable that someone would decide to stick Trials motorcycle gameplay in one. The art style is cool, though I can't help but side-eye the anthromorphic animal character design, but the gameplay itself somehow feels too slow and in a weird way apathetic to match the mood of this dark and foreboding world. Like even your character knows you're just going through the motions of yet another side scrolling shooter.

God DAMN this game is good. Metroidvania that controls like those old driving flash games, and works shockingly well. Music perfectly matches the themes and atmosphere, and the hand-drawn art-style is so full of personality. Lots of the regions on the map are pretty well designed, and weapons/ abilities you gain naturally let you reach new locations as you go, and they encourage experimenting with movement and tech. There's 2 points in the game that are total slogs but otherwise it keeps pace for the runtime. Particle effects and smoke can limit visibility which is annoying, though this is highly dependent on your screen resolution. Play this game cause it is GOOD

So I'll start with what I liked: I thought the art direction was pretty great, and the soundtrack quite good. The combat and movement was initially fun. Thats about all the positives for me personally. I found the metroidvania elements tacked on for no real reason, and the story that it was presenting to be pretty mediocre with uninteresting characters and a pretty run of the mill revenge-esque story, at least at the bit I stopped. The crafting and cooking are also like... why? Your just filling the game with unnecessary bloat when you had a really good innitial gameplay setup. The issue with the gameplay and movement is, it doesn't really evolve and gets old FAST. after doing a few cool spins and parrys you pretty much experienced the highlights from what I could tell. Its not a bad game, especially if you dont mind the 10,000th metroidvania, but its not what I hoped. I wish they had focused and evolved the core gameplay and movement, evolved it in interesting ways and cut out all the crud. As it stands I have no desire to finish it.

This game is inspired. An absolute must for those who enjoy metroidvanias. Heart pounding action with massive moments of fulfillment when getting through areas either stylishly or by the skin of your teeth. Along with just good mechanics, which again, absolutely inspired, the game has a fantastic soundtrack. At first I wasn't fully feeling it because when I think of a shooter with time slow mechanics and unique movement I think Katana Zero, and that game has an infamous soundtrack for what it was going for. I think this game does as well, I truly feel with the emotion it presents the soundtrack is perfect. As is the means of unlocking the soundtrack.

As for the story, it's very good. I found myself doing every side quest, as well. Each character is unique and interesting, and while all the side quests are just fetch quests, they're not hard or unenjoyable as the main thing about this game is the movement and the way you get around continues to change as you acquire new weapons and abilities. The main story is very touching, it's a great mother daughter tale, and coming of age story in a very unique way. 10/10, a must play.

It's a pretty unique spin on the metroidvania genre.

Unfortunately, it's plagued by some of the worst boss fights I've had the misfortune of experiencing. The bird pope was especially bad, but the crab made me outright quit the game.

I don't care for the furry character designs; they could have been human and it wouldn't have changed the story. I didn't really care for the story either. It's gritty and gory, which I like, but there's no substance to it. Even if the ending is good, I'll never see it as the game never gave me a reason to stick around that for that long.

The music was nice, but there's very little variety. I spent so much time listening to the same "sad girl" tracks on repeat that at some point, I had to put on a podcast to replace the music to keep me from losing my mind.

I should have quit this game 2 hours in. I suffered through it for 10 hours. I wanted to finish it, but I'm done. The unskippable 9-minute cutscene of a boat slowly going from right to left was... yeah. I have no words. What were they thinking? This game is soft torture.

It also doesn't run at 60 fps on the Steam deck; it barely reaches 45.

I was on board for the first couple of hours, but something quickly shifted and I had to stop playing. Perhaps it was the very clearly rigged blackjack minigame that I lost all my money on twice. I’ve read the developer saying it works the same as any casino blackjack, but basically any time I got 20 the house got 20 or 21.

This isn’t a blackjack game though, so I should also mention the looping soundtrack of not very good songs, the unintuitive traversal and aiming (I can imagine the latter being better on PC, but on a PS5 controller it’s rough, even with a generous aim assist) and badly written dialogue. I can’t really comment on the story but let’s just say it didn’t grab me.

I might come back to this another time, but for now it’s backloggd™️

Such a beautiful game that's let down by a budget, fairly clearly rushed bits, and some bad nu metroidvania ideas.

The art, music, and everything with the presentation (minus one thing) is amazing. There was a clear love and time taken with these aspects to the point that I won't bother bringing them up from now on.

Now onto a big issue is that the game really did not need a lot of its fluff. Nothing about them adds anything, the sidequests are tonally interesting but it feels like a good number of them could have been included in some other way that weren't the most basic of fetch quests without good directions. One other specific gripe is that you can just see the entire map and area names from the start, it's just so odd to have that in a game about discovery.

Anyways the true damning issue of this game is how after a certain point things aren't flowing well. The emotional climax happens and the rest of the game goes by, including plenty of cuts and sudden things happening for an ultimately pretty subpar ending.

However, I still do think people should play it, just know that after the honeymoon things will just lose steam.

Esse jogo foi um parto pra terminar, é um metroidvania que simplesmente o ato de se movimentar no mapa é complicado. Com o tempo, fica mais fácil mas continua bastante punitivo.

Outra crítica é o inexplicável backtracking que é necessário fazer no último terço do jogo. O jogo obriga a fazer umas quests bem secundárias nos confins do mapa e praticamente não existe uma forma de teleporte decente no jogo.

Tirando isso, é um jogo obrigatório para quem é fã de metroidvania. A trama pesadíssima, as músicas são um deleite, a criatividade nas mecânicas de batalha e de uso da moto para deslocamento valem a pena.

Me hubiera encantado poder hablar sólo de las cosas que tiene el juego: una música extraordinaria y una historia y unos personajes que quieres seguir conociendo, pero lamentablemente he tenido muchísimos problemas con el juego: tanto bajadas de framerates que me han dado dolor de cabeza, como bugs que me han obligado a reiniciar el juego varias veces durante la partida. Además, sigo sin entender la necesidad de hacer el juego tan difícil y que te obligue tantas veces a repetir las mismas zonas. Ya sólo llegar a algún punto del mapa desde los puntos de teletransporte se hace muy pesado y espero que mejore estos factores de cara el futuro, porque viendo los logros de Steam, sólo 1 de cada 4 personas está llegando al final del juego y creo que es una lástima.