Guacamelee!
Guacamelee is rich on mechanics, and it only gets richer as you play. It’s a game about learning buttons, proms, patterns in the environment and enemy attacks. It’s about twitch motions, fast precise combat and even faster platfoming. Guacamelee is not a game about deep system driven gameplay. It’s not about subtle storytelling or the bigger questions in life. And it’s definitely not ashamed of this. Gaining a new ability sets the screen in a frenzy of quickly flashing bright colors, were after the ability is forced deep in your skull. By locking you down, and only allowing you to leave if have mastered the new trade. Guacamelee is a game in its purest, most fundamental sense. It design plays to the strength of the medium, by picking from its roots, and shaving the old design form all but the most fundamental parts. When gaining a new ability, you won’t just know how to use it. You will also instantly know where to use it, this is done by color coding and mapping ever ability gate you meet. Though the game is extremely mechanics heavy, the task in front of you never gets too big. And you won’t ever get lost in you inventor of moves, or the open world. The learning curve is as flats a possible for a game as complex as Guacamelee.
The games look is original and is animated and drawn amazingly. As the player you are always interested in the next level, the art gives the game so much identity. At the same time the environments and character design serves at all time the gameplay. Not ones dose the game anything to confuse you or steal you attention. Enemies and the player are at all-time distinct form the background. The game looks exactly as it was meant to look with no short comings, while at the same time always serving the gameplay. It’s there to create variations. The art isn’t trying to tell stories, the art isn’t fundamental to the game. The art is mostly window dressing. Guacamelee is a game that might as well take place in outer space, or in the Dracula’s castle, as in a Mexican village. The art is beautiful and thrilling, but also redundant. And whenever it tries not to be that, whenever the art goes out of its way to be clever, to amuse, it fails horribly. The games use of references and internet memes is awful, and the game would have been better without it. The story and written parts of the game are less obnoxious, though Guacamelee would have been just as great, if not better, had characters all been silent. You are never in doubt about your goal. The game is a typical damsel in distress tale, and the game would have done just fine had the story been more voluntary and vague. Though to be fair the game isn’t overly obsessed with its own narrative either.
Because Guacamelee isn’t a novel, it’s poem. It’s about the feel of being in control. About the feeling of knowing you soundings, and knowing when to hit, where to hit, how to hit, and what that might lead to. Pulling off long platform series, lengthy combos, or well-timed button presses is what makes this game great. . Guacamelee is a very swallow game about a Mexican luchador, his loved one, and internet meme. But a great and complex experience about a wasting fools and using your abilities to conquer seemingly impossible platforming sections.The game isn't over ambitious it's modest in it's goals, but it mostly perfects everything it sets out to do. Guacamelee is fun.
