Fresh from the bundle farm: Guacamelee!

I don't really know if Guacamelee! is made by individuals of a Mexican pursuit, descendent or what not. As with many individuals born so far north of anywhere humans should actually choose to live, Mexican culture comes through the filter of an entire country of homogenization, leading me to only two conclusions: Mexicans have a flair for colors that require seizure warnings, and delicious. (the country in that example is the one between, in case you misunderstand)

I can not, unfortunately, eat Guacamelee! but I can describe it as Mexican Luchadore Super Metroid. Or maybe just Super Luchadore Mextroid? That sounds racist. Forgive me. Really, Super Metroid is one of my favorite games of all time, given I did play and beat the original Metroid as a small child and the basic design philosophy is likely to be one of my favorite of all time. Later Metroidvanias don't really hold up to me, becuase Metroid and Super Metroid both had this feeling of exploring an alien world.

Guacamelee! certainly isn't a classic - I'll set the tone right here, Super Metroid is a classic and Guacamelee! adds things to the model which flatly worsen the game to no real benefit in many cases - but it's amazingly charming and the art/music are (maybe?) culturally inspired by Mexican motifs, which gives you this really unusual and outlandish feel. Outlandish to someone born where there's two feet of snow still on the ground I mean. Many of the Super Metroid abilities are translated into this crazy wrestler world, with things like the bizarre Maru-Mari having a unique but equally bizarre version in this game. Not gonna spoil it, because it took me a moment when I realized what it was and I was very amused.
Regardless of setting the tone of the review, the one of Guacamelee is one of delightful colors, several cool mechanics and about 80% of its ideas that aren't theme lifted from Super Metroid. I'm not going to bitch about that because they don't try to hide it at all. I envision this romantic back story of a pair of young friends playing Super Metroid in their cool summer evenings and there's a bunch of racial stereotypes involved.

Ok, seriously, I don't know nearly enough about Mexico. Anything I describe here is going to be horribly racist, but either way, the game's visual motif is excellent and the game's core mechanics are primarily derived from Super Metroid. Or maybe other Metroids. Maybe they played like, the Return of Samus or something.

maybe not

(God that takes me back - the core idea of that game is you had to kill X number of Metroids, and I think this is the last boss given the counter is at one at the bottom. And yeah, I beat that when I was like, ten or something. It probably isn't very good.)

On the other hand, as I said, this is a wrestler game and you are a Luchador. I don't have the romantic attachment to wrestling many men do, but the Luchador concept is a pleasing one. The combat system, instead of involving ice beams and missiles, is primarily one of using combos to take out opponents. This is mostly pretty slick, though the game does have the odd animation error here or there that looks a bit clipped. The actual combo based combat is odd, and I can't really be arsed to even remember how to do whatever it envisions as combos.

Still, compared to most platformers the combat is fantastic most of the time and much better than you'd expect. It just feels good, and your luchador is extremely mobile, which I really favor. You can dodge roll and duck, and keep on your toes, and the game will reward you. I do admit I really didn't like the "shield color" mechanic, in which enemies have to be hit with a certain attack type to break their shield and land hits. Some of the fights involving this were pretty asinine, with enemies juggling you while their allies regain their shields. Also the combat arenas, which come in phases, can be extremely frustrating in that "forced to repeat something stupidly easy over and over to get to the hard part".

I think the shield break mechanic would be a bit more reasonable if enemies didn't constantly put their invulnerability shell back up, or on top of that - and this may very well be a vulnerability of the xbox360 controller - if it wasn't so frustrating trying to get him to reliably do the necessary move. Enemies with yellow shields, which requires the headbutt, requires you sit in place in order to do the headbutt, and it was just teeth grindingly awful getting it down reliably. The control scheme honestly uses too many buttons and several of the fights use the life/dead world switch mechanic to the simple addition of "suddenly you can barely see and can't harm the enemy until you hit a switch". This is just unnecessary tedium, and I get tired of juggling inputs.

The concept of jumping puzzles has always been a debated one in games and Guacamelee! is a little mixed in this regard. The main idea of jumping puzzles doesn't always work for me and I'm not ashamed to admit that my issue with them nowadays is generally less to do with the puzzles and more to do with the fact that stringing 16 button presses in a row in a narrow timeframe is a bit difficult given I have not really memorized my xbox controller perfectly. It's kinda why I didn't enjoy Dark Souls so much, though Guacamelee! doesn't have death penalties so it doesn't rub under my skin nearly as much. Anyway, some of the puzzles rely on flipping between the two universes and using specials and falling down walls to wall jump at specific points, and honestly it's the part where it's just so many inputs I fail at. That's a personal failing, don't get me wrong, but if you find it irritating you'll probably start to balk at this game.

What isn't a personal failing is, well, the universe flip trigger is a bit slow and you'll "jam" on transitions if you try to flip universes into a solid object. This is fine, but it shouldn't be part of a puzzle, since the hit box isn't perfect and it can just get very frustrating to jam the transition and end up falling back to start. The other thing is situations where you're made to use stamina consuming moves to do your jumping puzzles is really irritating since you'll end up pausing in attempts to wait on it to recharge. Also, as every platformer in the universe is mandated to contain, Guacamelee! of course has pointless spikes to pointlessly irritate you. I do not really understand the design obsession platformers have with spikes. Is there research that shows spikes make for more enjoyable games or something?

I actually had to look up a walkthrough in the one jumping puzzle laden section. One thing I really gotta note about jumping puzzles - Some people like them, some people don't, and there's room in a game for servicing different players but for the love of sweet sweet nachos please don't make optional jumping puzzles appear to be the path forward. It's just disgustingly bad design. The fact this became a recurring problem, or that I would get to areas and think like - Am I supposed to do this, as the casual gamer?

While I am, largely, not someone who enjoys jumping puzzles - Probably because it's an area where as an adult you know ten years ago you'd breeze through casually, but you're older and your eye hand coordination is weaker - the living/dead world click puzzles are just stupidly awful. I really liked the ones early on in the game, where you couldn't control it and you ended up with this overlapping two path through a linear room progression. It's hard to explain why, but it has this almost surreal four dimensional feel to it. The later ones though are just awful, the gimmick literally is 'push more buttons' and if you're at all bad at them they always jam all the way back to the ending because you fall through the floor. If you misclick at large gaps where the hitbox may or may not be in the transitional no go zone, the game error noises at you and you don't transition. Later on they add in jumping puzzles where you have to hold down Y (on the xbox controller) to hold onto the wall, adding a button you must be holding before you string through jump -> transition -> double jump -> hold once more and it just hurts my hands.

It becomes very difficult to recommend the game simply because the jumping puzzles do not at all feel like what you signed up for or what you necessarily care about. I don't really remember how many jumping puzzles Super Metroid had, but this is definitely more of a thing. The first two, maybe three hours of the game have interesting jumping puzzles, and then suddenly, you're just doing the same thing over and over and over. On the other hand, if you do want to play a torture platformer - though this game doesn't really quite cross that line - it takes so long to get to the hard parts you'll starve on what you're looking for.

While I generally liked the game, the things I was impressed with sort of faded away as the game slowly felt like they wanted to pad it out. I was also really unimpressed with the later maps, where you take what feels like the normal route and end up taking the torture platformer section. Often you'll do two hard sections and think, wait is this really where I'm supposed to go? And sure enough, you took a wrong turn and your reward is, oh boy, a health chunk. Some of the jumping puzzles mind you are fiendishly clever and did put a smile on my face, but lots of them are just 'jump here, don't hit spikes, repeat'. The levels looked good, but they lacked a sense of flow.

I didn't bother to do the last boss of this game. I mean I got to him, and I tried him for a bit. The game is over reliant on the shield break mechanic to the point of nauseating, and the last fight is just more of the same, with even more reliance on dodge rolling and jumping away from things. Well, to be fair, I got up, took a break from it and then came back to see that like nearly every game I've ever played in my life, the developers retain the same absolutely baffling inability to understand the fact I do not ever want to repeat a cut scene. Guacamelee!'s story isn't especially good or bad, but I didn't care about it at all and I don't really see why I'd want to sit through another cut scene to get to some boring fight I'm going to take 15 attempts to get down if I'm lucky.

Honestly you could remove all the dialogue from the game and I would enjoy it more.  Actually that's not true, the goat god was awesome.

I'm sure someone with a better grasp of the xbox controller would find it more enjoyable, but the boredom of waiting for the boss to re-appear, figure out what shield I'm supposed to break since he recharges his shield every single attack - assuming he hasn't shifted worlds at which point I have to hit the world switch key which tends to slow me down enough I won't get a hit through, dodge his attack that will kill me in four hits and covers a quarter of the screen, then rush back in and mmmmmaybe if I'm lucky land a hit. If I'm not so lucky, fumble an input, I probably sit there like an idiot and take a hit to face from his huge aoe. Repeat this 15-30 times depending on whether or not you get the timing down and ... Yeah I just don't care. It's essentially a game of simon says, and I just don't feel like it.

In summary, Guacamelee! has a beautiful visual style and a good combat system that suffers for an over reliance on its few creative mechanics. It's a solid platformer, but often enough I was very bored, and I'd hesitate to recommend it to anyone who isn't a big fan of the genre. I realized while trying to stomach Gianna sisters that I honestly don't like platformers anymore, they're not especially creative and they're just straight up not better than the ones I played as a kid. Guacamelee! is better than most, given I played it way longer than I have any other recent platformers, but it's still not as good as Super Metroid, which it references so often you start to just want to play Super Metroid.