If Guacamelee was a celebration riot through metroidvania, its sequel feels closer to an orderly parade across the same space. Guacamelee! 2 is a warm, expertly designed, devilishly preposterous, and, ultimately, safe return to its Mexiverse.
Guacamelee! delivered a piledriver to metroidvania’s modern revival. Games like Shadow Complex, Dust: An Elysian Tail, and Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet set a tone that Guacamelee would amplify with a frenzied mariachi band. Alien worlds, outrageous weapons, and hostile gunmen were replaced with Mexican folklore, lucha libre wrestling, and irate skeletons. When it was first released in 2013, Guacamelee’s escalating series of thematic novelties and fondness for wrestling power moves allowed it to stand out in a rapidly populating crowd.
Guacamelee 2 prefers iteration over advancement. The formidable opponents and menacing platforming challenges that took Guacamelee to the stratosphere begin to fall when you recognize Guacamelee 2 is launching itself off the same runway as Guacamelee. It’s well built and perfectly serviceable, but it’s presented as more of a callback to 8-bit and 16-bit days—when games changed very little between entries—than what is understood as a sequel in the world of 2018. Guacamelee 2 feels like a lateral, albeit more intense, move from Guacamelee.
Seven years have passed since the end of Guacamelee. Juan Aguacate has married El Presidente’s Daughter Lupita and, with two adorable children and their lovely agave farm, is enjoying nice family life. Meanwhile, a new antagonist from a different dimension of the Mexiverse, Salvador, is ripping apart time and space searching for supreme guacamole. After a verbose introductory sequence, Juan dons the luchador mask once more and sets out to platform off everything he can see and obliterate every skeleton in sight.
Guacamelee 2 drives curiosity when it de-powers Juan and removes all of the abilities he earned in Guacamelee. Each of Juan’s four-core moves not only provided options for combat, but functioned as keys to different colored barriers throughout the world. The uppercut could bust through red doors in the ceiling while the falling slam could shatter green doors in the floor. This created Guacamelee’s interpretation of metroidvania, encouraging players to return to conquered areas and see what was behind previously unexplored pathways.
I wondered how both progression and combat would be addressed with a fresh set of mechanics in Guacamelee 2. I didn’t have to wonder long because it became clear that I was going to spend most of Guacamelee 2 looking for those same powers in a different iteration of the Mexiverse. The head-butt still opens yellow doors and the dash punch still clears out blue doors. Even more demanding mechanics, like launching up or off of walls, or shifting between the living and dead dimensions, must be found (again) and added to Juan’s abilities. This was immediately disappointing.
Turning into a chicken, however, has seen tremendous improvement. While more of an afterthought in the original Guacamelee—it was hilarious that there was an entire button dedicated to turning into a chicken, often for no reason—it’s actually a viable strategy this time out. Pollo Power has its own diagonal attack, which unlocks purple doors, and a Mega Man 3 floor-slide, which busts down copper-colored doors. A snappier basic combo and rapid-fire special moves actually make the chicken a fun combat option and a welcomed change of pace.
Guacamelee 2 also offers a half-dozen linear levels exclusively suited to the chicken. These make use of not only its new special moves, but also a glide ability and a challenging use of fans. The former essentially boils down to a back-and-forth manipulation of gravity, but it’s an element brand new to Guacamelee 2. As one might expect, the chicken levels are also subject to many of the same dimension-shifting and skeleton fighting challenges of the rest of Guacamelee 2, only you’re a chicken.
The Eagle Boost is Guacamelee 2’s signature new mechanic. Essentially a grappling-hook, Juan can latch onto it and fire himself 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Once it’s mixed in with the remainder of Guacamelee 2’s challenges, the Eagle Boost adds another welcomed variable into the suite of actions that the player needs to keep on-tap at any time. You need to be able to morph into a chicken, perform one of four special moves, phase between two dimensions and lookout for Eagle Points all at the same time. Enough failure will eventually allow muscle memory to do this process for you, but cruising at the speed of light through Guacamelee 2 should, at least in a speed-run video, look and feel awesome.
While retaining many of the same mechanics, Guacamelee 2 isn’t short on ways to test them. There are still rolling phases of disappearing platforms, thrilling escapes from giant creatures, tricky trans-dimensional lava columns, falling elevators with dangerous spikes, shifting snake rides up a temple, and any number of threats that require the player to employ every mechanic while transforming to and from a chicken. There are honestly so many raw platforming challenges in Guacamelee 2 that it’s a struggle to think of a single genre staple it doesn’t employ, and that’s not counting the dozens of one-off rooms with isolated challenges for single treasure chests. Guacamelee 2 unloads every platforming trick in the book and, while sometimes very difficult, rarely feels impossible. That alone is evidence of care and dedication to an extremely specific craft.
This sentiment carries over to Guacamelee 2’s combat sequences. While it retains a significant number of the same enemies from the first game, it combines with new foes like a skeleton that uses magic to enhance or resurrect other skeletons and a matador that charges it blade arms directly into the player. They’re all deployed in dozens of verities and combinations, and, toward the back quarter of the game, usually joined by timed-piñatas that must be destroyed or else the entire battle is forfeit. Guacamelee 2, much like the first game, is confident that the player will have more than enough tools and abilities to dispose of any problem. For the most part, it’s right.
Fleshing-out Juan’s abilities is a process that is much better organized. He meets five different masters of different disciplines (fitness, fighting, wrestling throws, chicken stuff, and special moves) and can use money, earned through combat and in chests, to improve and gain different abilities. Also available in treasure chests are items that increase Juan’s life and stamina, complete with colorful screens that will frighten anyone with epilepsy. I made it through Guacamelee 2 with every ability and a ton of cash to spare, signifying that you don’t have to go for every impossible-looking treasure chest to reach every concrete goal.
Guacamelee 2 delights in personal empowerment. Watching the combo meter grow (and grow in spite of a few hits, thanks to Flame Face’s unlock tree) yields even more gold and can decrease the stamina-cost of special moves. Juan can turn into a true killing machine, sometimes even appearing to catch on fire as he thrashes everything in his path without discrimination. There’s another, seldom used sequence that involves the chicken and a large blue feather. I won’t spoil what follows but it’s a sensation of domination on par with getting the upgraded Gravity Gun in Half Life 2. Guacamelee 2 understands that, on a rare occasion, it’s OK to let the player feel shades of indiscriminate god-like power.
Eccentric humor demands more attention that Guacamelee 2’s plot. The nature of dimension hopping leads to brief cameos from other popular games and game genres. Guacamelee 2, for example, seeks to explore the social implications economic fallout of a very specific instance from Street Fighter II. These sequences and other background references and parodies will likely hold up better than the original Guacamelee’s meme humor (most of which were already cut out of its Xbox One debut in Super Turbo Championship Edition), but it leaves the game’s plot off to the side. Dialogue feels incidental and character development is isolated to a couple scenes. Guacamelee 2 doesn’t have much interest in telling a creative story.
Guacamelee 2 also advertises (up to) four player cooperative play. I can imagine this as an especially chaotic mixture of deliberate pain and suffering if your friends are all at different skill levels, but I admire the decision to see it through to a completed product. The core game doesn’t feel compromised to accommodate more bodies; the availability of multiplayer doesn’t harm the single player experience. It’s possible what I perceive as a lack in meaningful new content In Guacamelee 2 was actually the agony and merriment of mutually assured destruction found in letting four people try to play Guacamelee 2 at the same time. I also couldn’t convince anyone to play it with me. If that’s the case then, well, you found an angle I couldn’t see and I wish you well.
In five years I will be unable to remember what separates Guacamelee from Guacamelee 2. Their shared mechanics will homogenize into the same memory of a Día de Muertos wonderland full of eccentric characters, bright and beautiful colors, and some of the most demanding platforming inside (or outside) of a metroidvania game. It’s disappointing that Guacamelee 2 couldn’t create more separation from its past but, at the same time, it’s impressive that DrinkBox found more to build with many of the same tools and materials. Guacamelee 2 suggests that indulging a genre can be almost as much fun as disrupting one.
