Guacamelee! 2

The good: - It's a "true" metroidvania with a single big map and traversal abilities that double as combat moves. - Looks nice. - Humour is meh, but it's there. The bad: - Enemy attacks interrupt yours. Get used to being thrown around a lot. And there is no air recovery AFAICT. The best strategy seems to be to stunlock the enemies. - Game has VERY complex input with enemies randomly requiring you to use one of the many color-coded abilities. IMHO it does not add any depth to the combat system, just difficulty. - Platforming sections suffer from this too. Long and unnecessarily complex input sequences requiring perfect timing. TL;DR Don't bother if you don't have perfect reflexes and coordination. I, for one, won't be able to complete this game after spending up to half an hour per screen in the obsidian temple.

Having grown up with the NES, "Classically Trained" as they say, this game is not too hard. The difficulty is perfectly tuned and combined with such excellent controls I laugh when I fail over and over on the harder parts because I know and can feel in the thumb sticks that it is completely my fault. The game does a great job of making you feel like a hero with the combo system. If you put some effort into it you can pull off some crazy stuff. The layers of graphics are gorgeous and really show a labor of love in the details. The music is that perfect mix of great yet flows seamlessly into the background. I am truly blown away that this is as good as the first one. A modern masterpiece that is just good old fashioned fun.

Metroidvania action platformer where you solve all your troubles with your fists and your cool moves, but you probably already knew that. Even tho the game plays almost exactly the same as the first one, there are some important additions, bumped up graphics (the style is the same, but you can see the imprrovements in the scenary), new special moves, and more importantly, new challenges. Seriosuly, some of these platforming challenges are sadistic, the saving grace is that there is a checkpoint for each room, so you won't have to struggle for hours like in the "path of pain", but is specially painful because just like in the first game you'll need to perform special moves and change dimensions in miliseconds for some of the more challenging rooms. Don't take me wrong, even at its worst the game is good, there's no reason to not pick it up if you are a fan of platformers or metroidvanias.

...oh, I’m-not-sorry-I’m-not-sorry, was that altered Metal Gear Solid quote - from Psycho Mantis - completely out of left field, not called for, not clever in the slightest, and actually kind of insulting and patronizing? Don’t play Guacamelee 2, then. I LOVED (the first) Guacamelee back in the day; played it, loved it, 100%ed back in the Christmas season of 2014...don’t ask me why I felt like playing a game about Mexico during the snow season, just couldn’t get into it the preceding Summer, for whatever reason. ...I’ve never been so pissed off at the first 25 minutes of a game like I have with Guacamelee 2. First, you get an “homage” to the opening of Castlevania ~ Symphony of the Night, with all the famous quotes aped from it. Okay, fine, it's a Metroidvania. Then you get warped to something that looks like something out of Limbo (the 2011 indie game by Playdead). WHY? Then you get warped to Rivera (River) City Ransom (the NES game by the same makers of Double Dragon), and they ape a quote from Bad Dudes. Then you see posters of He-Man, Skeletor, Black Panther, and Pearl, Garnet and Amethyst from STEVEN UNIVERSE as luchadors. When you try to make all these RANDOM references to other games and IPs - to try and engender warm and fuzzy feelings about YOUR product - it says that you have ZERO confidence in it. There’re proper places for parody, satire, and meta-referential humor, but you have to do them RIGHT. Oh yeah, Juan’s also a has-been hero with a dad bod and kids at the beginning of the game; at least Lupita married him, but so much for that MAJOR in JUMANITIES and BECOMING A GIRL BOSS, AMIRITE?! (Go look back at the first game, they spell “Humanities” with a “J” because they’re partially using Mexican-Spanish). ...I’d just replay the original Guacamelee at this point, but I’ve already bought and paid for this game, can’t refund it anymore, at least gonna TRY and get my money's worth out of it, maybe the REST is fine, but…! Worst. OPENING. EVAR!