¡Hola amigos y amigas! Mi nombre es Mento. ¿Dónde está la biblioteca? But that's enough of my powerful command over the Spanish language for now, as this week we're featuring a Mexican-themed game to celebrate the Day of the Dead in a fashionably late manner. It's Guacamelee! 2, the second in the luchador explormer series from Drinkbox Studios, a developer from the Mexico-adjacent country of Canada. (Yes, my geography is just as estimable as my foreign language skills.) I'll admit that I wasn't fully impressed by the first Guacamelee! due to some uneven boss difficulty and late-game mob fights that dragged on forever due to some colored shield nonsense, but since then Drinkbox has since become a studio to watch between excellent games like 2016's Severed and last year's Nobody Saves the World. As the 2018 release of Guacamelee! 2 fits snugly between the two, I had every expectation to see a greatly improved sequel.

What I found shocked and horrified me.

Well, OK, it did neither of those things; I'm past the halfway point though and there's a familiar sinking feeling as more abilities become unlocked. As in the first game, the color-coded power-ups (blue is an air-dash, red is an uppercut, green is a slam, and so on) are both relevant to the explormer traversal—the map helpfully once again remembering where each inaccessible area is and the color of the thing blocking it, which makes backtracking for 100% much less painful—and to the brawler combat, which does indeed reintroduce the shields that require those specific power-ups to break, if only temporarily. Tougher encounters involve more of these shielded foes mixed together, requiring you to essentially pull off the video game version of patting your head while rubbing your stomach as you try to decipher the chaotic melee in front of you before you can start busting heads. The combat, for what it's worth, remains compelling between its air juggles and dodge rolls and various combos: a minor antagonist from the first game with a flame for a head gets you up to speed on effective chains with each new power-up earned. It can just be a little much occasionally, and since a lot of moves have animation priority there's an inertia that makes it hard to quickly switch from offense to defense if an enemy is about to swing at you, or if you whiff because they popped up behind you. It's fine, and I always like a combat engine that lets me throw enemies into stage hazards to kill them, but it doesn't feel that much more improved over the original; maybe there's some late-game power-ups to make it more intriguing.

I can happily confirm that the game's sense of humor is still as delightfully stupid as ever, combining corny dad jokes with random internet memes in a way that is never as overly embarrassing as you might dread. There was a lot of this in Nobody Saves the World too, as well as the first Guacamelee! of course (Severed was a tad more sober), so I've become accustomed to it. Hell, reading enough of my own material is a sufficient vaccine of sorts for crappy humor tolerance (and this isn't the first time I or someone else has compared my jokes to smallpox). Getting back to the game, Guacamelee! 2 establishes that seven years have passed since the heroic luchador Juan defeated his undead nemesis Carlos Calaca at the end of the first game—they make you replay it in manner not unlike the prologue to Symphony of the Night, and boy howdy you better believe they reference the famous dialogue—and settled down with the sacrificial heroine, Lupita, eventually developing a dad bod from too many avocados while pining for his glory days as the masked savior of the world. However, his caprine mentor Uay Chivo suddenly requests his presence to defeat a sinister lucha rival, Salvador, over in the Darkest Timeline: failure to stop his plans may lead to the destruction of the entire Mexiverse itself. The mask is back on and Juan has his excuse to go back to beating up skeletons and combing maps for upgrades.

Guacamelee! 2 feels more it's polishing up its moves than trying to innovate on the original; it's been a while since I played the first, admittedly, but much of the game's quirks remain for better and worse. A few obvious changes include expanding on Juan's "pollo" form, which now has its own (almost admittedly better) combat moveset along with some unique battle upgrades like a slide and a diagonal charge attack, both of which get a heavy workout while platforming as well. That, of course, means a few extra shield colors to make combat that much more awkward to parse. It sometimes feels like I'm playing the Streets of Rage equivalent of Simon Says: orange, red, red, green, blue, brown, orange, red, purple and remembering all the moves that correspond to them is a typical fight where I'm at—and lord help the colorblind, who'll have an even more enervating time with this kaleidoscopic nightmare. At least the platforming remains stellar, though these optional gauntlets to earn some magical key parts for a big Chicken Illuminati secret level (don't ask) might prove to be my undoing if they're all as difficult as the one I just completed. Some real nasty trial-and-error business.

Regardless, whether the new changes are significant or minor, the first Guacamelee! didn't need a whole lot of improvement on its explormer fundamentals—the issues were always with its late-game difficulty spikes and hectic multicolored crowd control, and I can only speak to the latter right now as still being a factor. However, for as much as I braced myself for a similarly sour experience I have to admit to enjoying this game a lot so far. The two temples I've played through (I'm on my way to the third and final) had some inventive platforming puzzles and combat scenarios alike and there's a definite sense that the crew behind the game applied everything they'd learned making the first one to produce a much more confident sequel, even if it doesn't feel like they went out of the way to fix what was wrong with it. Given how vibrant the world is, it might be said that they just painted over all the cracks instead.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Post-Playthrough Edit: Oof, yeah, pretty much the same late-game issues as Guacamelee!, right down to a very unpleasant boss fight with a certain cat-person. Maybe the difficulty is a little more forgiving or I've just gotten better at dealing with this franchise's nonsense, but I wasn't hitting my head against the final challenges quite as much. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and say that, while it has its moments, it's probably a little more even-keeled with regards to difficulty spikes. The gauntlets where you're blasting bomb monsters before they explode and insta-kill you really did suck a cajone though. I'll keep it at 4 out of 5 because I really did enjoy my time with it more consistently than the first. (Oh boy, though, making a whole bonus area mocking those who insult-reviewed the first game for its obnoxious use of memes was a real low point. "Figuratively written by Reddit" is right.)