Layla

One day, I was digging through a totally legal collection of NES games online, and while scrolling through the list, this game called Layla caught my attention. Just look up the art for this game, it feels like there's something cool to be found here.

Unfortunately, the art set me up for disappointment.

This game is a side-scrolling shooter that starts off with some very annoying music. You go through interiors of asteroids from left to right, and most of the time, you shoot enemies in your way, break some boxes for items, and then you go up or down an elevator at the end. That may sound simple, but, boy is this game not friendly to beginners. Or people who like controls to feel good.

I get that Layla, the protagonist, is in space and the physics are wacky because of this, but there's this weird sliding feeling when you go left or right, like you're stuck sliding for too long after you let go of the d-pad. This affects you when it comes to turning around, if you're walking a certain way, you gotta commit to that shit, because you won't be able to turn around until Layla stops moving, or you make her hit the brakes by ducking.

In other words, stay away from ledges. Did I mention that Layla gets stuck on her ducking state unless you...nevermind, the controls are kinda shit, that's what I'm trying to say here.

It also doesn't help that if you stay still for too long, a little tornado comes in to severely damage you. This tornado doesn't take long to kill you, but you can kill it as well...it's very risky to try it, but if you pull it off, you get a health refill.

I guess that's another positive - you don't die in one hit. You have a health bar.

However, if you do die, it's an instant game over. You only have one life here.

I could end the review here. You have one life, and bad physics to work with. There are passwords after the first stage, but fuck that, this shouldn't be necessary to get more than one chance.

It's a shame, too, because you have multiple weapons, and the level design isn't so bad. The bosses are easy, but getting to them becomes very tough in later levels. The enemies become overpowered, and there are a few parts that are...a bit cryptic, to say the least.

In the first level, there's a part where it looks like you're in a dead end. It looks as if you could fall down into the next area if the part blocking you was blown up. I tried throwing grenades, but that didn't work. Since I got stuck for a while, the tornado came after me. Later, I figured out what to do - you're supposed to press Down to teleport down to the next area. You have a lot of weapons, so my first instinct was to try to blow shit up!

This kind of thing happens again in a later stage, except you're supposed to press Up to teleport to an upper area, right after a part where you had to go through a little maze where some blocks are breakable and others aren't.

I feel like this game tried to do a little too much at once. They should have just focused on the aspect of collecting disks (or chips, or whatever those glowing things are with a C on the sprite, they're found in rooms just before the bosses), maybe they could have made it so the disks are in some breakable boxes and you could only access bosses if you found the disks. Plus, they could have made the physics not shitty. There would have been nothing wrong with this if it was just a shooter where you wrecked enemies, and broke boxes open to find keys or disks to access the boss.

As it is, this game is a story of what could have been. If only this game had better physics and controls, if only the enemies weren't too strong in later levels, if only the soundtrack wasn't mostly bad, if only that stupid tornado wasn't there...Oh, well. The idea of a good game is there. And hell, once you rescue Iris, she mirrors your movements and actions, so that kind of helps...but not really, because the enemies are just flat out cheap by the time she's around.

I can't say this is a 1/5, and that's mostly because I can see how some tweaks here and there could really improve this. Sadly, I also can't say this is a good game. I will give it a shout-out for featuring a heroine when that wasn't common...but the game also needed to be fun.