Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition

As described Guacamelee! is a metroid/vania action platformer. The game is easy to fall in love with immediately - the bright colors, fantastic art direction, fun combat, exploration and side-quests - all make it absorbing from the start. Guacamelee! will easily keep you in this state of absorption for the first and middle parts of the game, it is only towards the end where things begin to fall apart. Towards the last 3rd of the game you will more than likely want to unlock some of the secret orbs (which if all are collected gives you a flight ability and different ending). What's disappointing is this ability is incredibly difficult and frustrating to get as it requires an absurdly unforgiving amount of platforming to reach and is ultimately not utilized by the game in any way. This is a shame as flying around with the ability is quite fun and would be more so if it was used in a way to unlock more secret areas or simply complete the normal ones. There is a trend among developers lately to embrace this kind of unforgiving, frustration from their old school nes/snes origins. What made Super Metroid a classic was its lack of frustration and feelings of completion in exploration. Brutally punishing one-size-fits-all games belong in the dustbin of history or on a separate game mode. Guacamelee! while not entirely embracing a pathology of punishment towards its audience, certainly dips its toe in such waters. This is ultimately what prevents it from becoming a new classic and instead simply relegates it to a game I can recommend in spite of its flaws.

First of all: i do adore Guacamelee! videogame! It's a pure joy to play through this game! It's fun and has a nice mix of mexican culture with great music, bright graphics, beat'em'up gameplay and the metroid scheme! I enjoyed playing this game with my wife - no problem at all: for extra-hardcore parts with switching between worlds the second player can drop-out and drop-in back some time later. But i can't understand: why does GOG still have the Gold edition with a bunch of extra extras for sale along with this (i guess full and final?) STCEdition with much less extras? Not that polite to push me buying two editions of the ...same... game to get all the extras :( Thanks to Humble Bundle - i got the Gold edition there with the soundtrack included :P

My buddy played through this alone and insisted it was a fantastic game we needed to play together. i thought the concept sounded cool and I do like metroidvania games. As a single player experience, this game appears to be great. The puzzles are simple and the abilities are fun with fast, fluid combat. Add multiplayer to the mix and the guacamelee becomes a bit sour. Many of the games puzzles involve platforming while switching between the world of the living and dead, which causes other platforms to appear and disappear. This makes some of the platforming just impossible with two people. Instead of making it workable, they added a feature to turn into an orb to be able to move to your partner and re-materialize. This meant most of the platforming was done by one person while the other watched... or ended in some hilarious-at-first deaths that just became tedious. It's another one of those games where they added multiplayer because. And just because. I think the game is probably much better in single player. The dimension switching alone causes other issues, since any player can switch dimensions at will. Add to this the monster's ability to inflict damage but be immune to it if you are in the opposite dimension as them and arenas full of monsters in both dimensions and you have a chaotic situation on your hands.

Yep, Guacamelee! is one of those rare games, that clearly has a soul. It's just obvious in every moment of the game. It's clear that the developers fell in love with their own project and the love lasted till the end (and till the sequel to be more precise...). This is a platforming-action Metroidvania with a small but very-well balanced progression system, some neat costumes (with their own buffs and debuffs) a super-simple but great and touching story, absolutely bollocks (Mexi-)humor and a flashy, light-hearted, beautiful style. I want to say something bad because no game could be perfect, but in regards of what Guacamelee trying to achieve, it's really is. The game is not trying to be the most hardcore or technical platformer (thank the gods!) and also not trying to beat the Devil May Cry level super-duper-hardcore battle and combo system. To be more clear, it could be hard but it's never unfair and it's fun for the less seasoned platformer gamers like me, but also challenging enough for hardcore plat veterans. It is just what it is: A great action-platformer with superb level design, a fair length, and a lovable, living (also dead) world and characters. If I write more it will become a clueless, blinded praise, so I'll cut it here: It's one of the most pure FUN games I ever played. It's just wants to be FUN from beginning to the end and it remains FUN throughout the whole journey. And what a journey this is...