A lighthearted Metroidvania, Guacamelee delivers a strong gameplay punch.
What Is It? A nefarious bad guy kidnaps the girl, threatens the town, and so on. As Juan, you quickly find a luchador mask and transform into a skeleton-crushing machine and you are on your way in Guacamelee Super Turbo Championship Edition, a 2D Metroidvania adventure.
As you might have guessed, Guacamelee’s combat is strictly of the hand-to-hand variety. At the start of your journey, you will only be able to punch, throw, and slam enemies. You will learn more skills which expand your options, and you can make some of them more powerful by purchasing upgrades using collected coins. The punches here are heavy and satisfying. Deliver a combo and the enemy will go flying. Beat them up enough and you can grab and toss or slam them.
The extra abilities have a color associated with them. An uppercut, for example, is red in Guacamelee-land. If you see a red block, destroy it with an uppercut. If you see an enemy surrounded by a red aura, uppercut them to break the shield and start dealing damage. As a final wrinkle on top of the four color-coded attacks, you will eventually be able to switch between the living and dead realms at the touch of a button. Certain enemies are in one or the other, so you will have to switch to damage them. Throw all of this together and you will find that the main component to combat in Guacamelee is recognizing these color cues and quickly dealing the appropriate attack to match. This style is a lot of fun for me. It is a fairly basic combat system in that all of the moves are melee, but needing to use certain attacks to break shields then chaining together other attacks for big damage combos all adds up to a nice, fun, satisfying six hours of beating up skeletons.
As is the case with most every Metroidvania, the world is large with various skill-based gates blocking out certain sections until Juan is ready to enter. Juan will travel down a mostly linear path, guided by map markers, until he reaches the end, typically a boss fight. Along the way, a new skill or two is learned to help reach new spots, something like the uppercut to destroy those red blocks, for example. The platforming here is fairly basic but is quite fun. By the end you will be rolling, double-jumping, wall-jumping, shooting up and out from walls, and others. The actual move set is limited compared to others in the genre, but the level design is strong enough to make the platforming challenges tough and fun.
There are plenty of secrets throughout. Most of which provide pieces which work toward giving you extra health or stamina. These are often locked behind a fun, tough platforming challenge which may take you a dozen or more tries to master. There are also some very well hidden secrets to unlock the true ending, these are an extra layer of difficulty in exploration, platforming, and combat. All of this is optional, although you’ll have a significantly easier time if you pay attention to some obvious spots to grab those upgrade treasures.
Rounding out the game is a wonderful art style. The luchador theme is carried throughout and the screen is always popping with bright colors. There might be a few too many routine skeleton enemies to destroy, but when the variety shows up, they all look great. The writing is strong, as almost every conversation you can have will have a joke or two mixed in. Also, you can turn into a chicken with a press of the button.
The Best Part: The boss fights are fun and provide a nice, not overwhelming, difficulty spike. Each will have some patterns you need to learn, including some unblockable attacks. None are annoyingly difficult, but most of them will take at least a few tries. Boss fights should exist to add fun, new wrinkles to the normal combat and push players with a bit of difficulty. The bosses in Guacamelee do exactly that.
The Worst Part: This is a cop-out answer, but the existence of Guacamelee 2 and the ways in which it expands upon the systems here is the only real downside to the original Guacamelee. I’ve played through Guacamelee a few times, both before and after playing the sequel, and it has been fun each and every time, but the sequel is better in my book.
The Verdict: Guacamelee doesn’t reinvent the Metroidvania wheel. Both its combat and platforming movesets are fairly limited compared to others in the genre. The reason Guacamelee succeeds is that it stretches those systems in enough different directions that they remain challenging and fun throughout. Add in a very unique art style and setting, a good dash of humor, and wrap it in a tight six hour runtime and you have an absolute winner. Guacamelee may not be the most innovative game in the genre, but it stands as one of my favorites over a decade after its initial release.
How to Play: PlayStation 3/4/5*, Vita, Nintendo Wii U/Switch, PC, Xbox 360/One
*console played on for this review
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