Guacamelee! is a standard “Metroidvania” game, which is to say it’s an open-ended 2D beat-em-up side-scrolling in which you gain new abilities over time that allow you to explore previously inaccessible places. It’s formulaic as hell, but it’s a proven formula executed here well.
The art is Guacamelee!‘s biggest strength. It has vibrant, well-animated characters that manage to look both minimalistic and expressive. Its world is like a distillation of a greater Internet geekdom filtered through a Mexican lens. Every poster in the game references another indie game, a gaming website, or an Internet meme, which is turned into a cartoonish Mexican commercial.
Once you get the power to switch between the Land of the Living and the Land of the Dead, you’ll realize that every geeky poster has its Día de Muertos counterpart. It’s all pretty clever and constantly makes you smile.
Unfortunately, combat is a significant part of this formula, and the combat in Guacamelee! doesn’t quite work. You’re not very maneuverable, and all your attacks are followed by a slight pause that makes you feel slow despite the wonderfully fluid animation. This feels awkward at first, but eventually the combat demands more precision than the controls allow.
Some enemies will have shields that only break when hit with a specific attack, but you won’t be able to use that one necessary attack because you’re too busy dodging bones, scythes, and hammers from all directions. You might risk a punch every now and then, but you’re not doing any actual damage.
Then a demon hedgehog will roll at you with an un-dodgeable attack and knock you to the ground. Since you’re not invincible after getting hit, you’ll get hit yet again as you go through the “standing up” animation. Even though you have a sizable health bar, the combination of enemies and animations encourages you to give up and restart after getting hit just once.
Charm is the first thing to go once a game gets frustrating. After a particularly grueling battle in Guacamelee!, you’ll be in such a foul mood that the jokes won’t be funny, the memes and references will seem dumb instead of clever, and the game’s charm will seem forced.
The platforming sections are similarly demanding, requiring you to switch between dimensions and perform special moves with such pixel precision that the jumps become an exercise in obsessive repetition until you know what you must do before you do it. And it’s awesome.
However, Guacamelee!‘s platforming is devoid of any real stakes. If you run into too many spikes and die, you respawn at the nearest shop (of which there are many), and if you fall into water or a bottomless pit, you’re immediately transported to the last piece of land that you were standing on. You’re never punished for failing a jump, and since most of these difficult jumps are optional, leading to hidden treasures, you literally have nothing to lose but everything to gain.
The platforming embodies a very different design philosophy from the combat. Both ramp up quite a bit in difficulty, but whereas the combat motivates you to try by threatening you with death, the platforming motivates you to try by tempting you with power-ups. It’s positive versus negative reinforcement, and by the end of the game, it becomes clear which one is more effective. I stopped playing at the final boss, but I found a vast majority of those optional power-ups.
Guacamelee! is entertaining but slight. It sets out to do one thing well, and it does that one thing well, but all the good will earned through the early part of the game gets used up once the combat ramps up in difficulty. As a result, you’ll either quit before the end or keep at it over and over again until the game’s charm wears off completely.
On the plus side, the $15 price tag includes the game’s PSN and PS Vita versions. Guacamelee also supports cross-play, meaning you can save your game on the PlayStation 3 and continue playing on the Vita.