Guacamelee! review

When you first go to play Guacamelee, which you are going to because it's awesome, the first thing you'll notice is the visual style. Sure, it's 2D but what indie game isn't these days? I didn't know I wanted it but when I found it I realized how much games have lacked it: an awesome Mexican-inspired art style. It's bright, colorful, and humorous, especially in the towns of Pueblucho and Santa Luchia. These luchador-loving hub worlds are full of references to video games and internet culture in the form of posters, such as the Mario Brothers re-imagined as luchadores:

In fact, the entire game is full of references to other games, from Mario and Metroid to Castle Crashers. The dialogue as well makes numerous references, and is humorously aware of it, giving the classic "save the girl from the big bad guy" story its unique charm.

Also the soundtrack is amazing. Sort of a mashup of electronic beats with more traditional latin sounds. I'm always a sucker for a great soundtrack, and this one really fits with the hectic fighting.

Not just for opening doors

A luchador lives to fight, and the protagonist Juan does that very well. In its most basic form, Guacamelee's combat is simple 2D brawling, with punching and kicking and throwing, and a dodge roll ability thrown in for good measure. It feels great to send enemies flying into other enemies  but there's more to it than just that. See, Guacamelee is a game in the tradition of Metroidvania games in which you must find new abilities to progress, like a double jump to get to a new area and the ability to smash through a previously unpassable door. What Guacamelee does differently is instead of giving you, say, a grappling hook to climb up stuff, it gives you a fighting move that's primarily used in combat as well as getting you up there. Many fights require you to use all of your abilities, and the ones that don't require them will probably kick your ass if you don't incorporate them into your punching repertoire. This means that as the platforming parts get more complicated as you acquire more moves, the fights get more and more complex as well. What starts off as punching an enemy until you can throw him at another quickly gets entangled with mechanics like air combos, breaking shields with specific moves, and enemies that can't be hit with most of your attacks.

Perfect Pacing

There's one thing that's a little less obvious that makes Guacamelee great from a game design perspective. With each new mechanic added, like an uppercut that can be used as an extra jump comes new possible situations, both in platforming and combat. What Guacamelee does really well is fully exploring each of these ideas but never to the point of making that idea stale. For example, there's one fight late in the game where it's just Juan against flying, stationary time bomb enemies. Each wave threw a wave of these "exploders" at you, and you'd have to destroy them in order or take damage. Each wave was more complicated than the next, until one wave leads you in a circle of the entire room, forcing you to use every one of your abilities with precise timing. Then, the fight ends and there's never a fight like that again.

The game moves from one idea to the next, seamlessly and quickly. It keeps it short and sweet, making it only about 8 hours long for me. There's never a fight where you think "this is exactly like the last one" and never a platforming segment that has you repeating an action until it gets boring. That's what the pacing of a game like this should be like, and Guacamelee got it perfect!

P.S. The entire game can be played local co-op which is awesome.

Dark Souls 2 BRO-OP

Dark Souls 2, like all the Souls games, focuses mostly on singleplayer. But for players who need a little help or who just want to engage in some jolly co-operation, there's co-op. In Dark Souls 1, summoning another player was a mysterious affair. You had no clue who they were, had no way other than gestures to communicate with them (in fact on Xbox 360 the game didn't allow you to be in a party chat while playing in online mode), and you might never see their summon sign again. It was also down to chance if the peer-to-peer connection system would even let you connect. I wasted sometimes fifteen minutes in one spot just trying to summon two people for a difficult boss.

Die with your friends!

Dark Souls 2 took a step in the right direction for those of us who would like to play with our friends instead of random players across the internet. Most exciting for us Dark Souls 1 fans was that they made dedicated servers for matchmaking. This means summoning is many times more stable, but there's still peer-to-peer connection in the game itself. So for PVP'ers that means faster connection times but still enough lag to make some fights downright broken. Anyways, FromSoftware decided this time to include things like the Name Ring, which allows players to choose a "god" (basically choosing a server) so they can more easily find their friends who chose the same god, and included voice chat. Nobody really uses the voice chat, but if you're into yelling at random people over the internet to help you against that giant lava demon you're fighting, you can do that.

A big problem with the matchmaking, co-op and PVP alike, is that the server matches players up based on their total souls collected, called "soul memory", and not their actual level or the strength of their gear. This means if someone doesn't lose any souls and puts it all into boosting their stats and upgrading one set of equipment, they become overpoweringly strong compared to a newer player who loses souls to deaths and spends a lot on upgrades and trying out a variety of items. Also, if you want to co-op with a friend both of you have to keep your soul memories close or you won't be allowed to connect. If it were me, I would have based matchmaking on a combination of equipped gear strength and character levels.

The Bro-Op

I did an entire playthrough of the game co-op, and we had a great time with it. He took on the role of the squishy mage, who would stand back and throw dark magic and fireballs at the enemies, while I quickly fell into the classic tank class, covered in armor, swinging a mace, and eventually becoming a wall with a giant stone greatshield. We powered through the game, though mages aren't that effective early on, and our complimentary builds made short work of any boss. Because one of us was dealing magic damage, the other could focus on pure physical destruction.

Because we could focus on our roles, we became pretty overpowered pretty quickly. Another upside to co-oping the entire game is each character gets twice the souls they would playing solo, because due to the host/ summoned phantom system we had to basically play the game twice, once for each of our games. It felt less like a dangerous Dark Souls experience and like a MMO dungeon raid, which was a good change of pace from the over-cautious play the game demands when playing solo. Overall, I can say that co-oping the game is an awesome thing to try out, but it's easy to tell that the game wasn't designed around two players.

Double fist-pump selfie! Note FromSoft's hilariously bad name censorship here: I'm supposed to be "Bro Knight"