Guacamelee! Gold Edition

I usually have an attention span of 5-10 minutes, I get bored very fast. The pace of the game, the simple story, the progressive introduction of new mechanics in the game makes this one of the best platformers Ive played in recent history. Its not easy nor difficult you just have to think and coordinate. + Nice boss encounters + Nice soundtrack + Creative use of game mechanics + Cheap

Guacamelee! is a very good looking "metroidvania" game, with fun luchadore-culture-inspired setting and interesting combat and navigation mechanics. It is also, unfortunately, the game which doesn't know what to do with all that and tries to be best at everything, becoming a clunky annoying mess in the later parts of game. The game starts great with fun unique setting and amazes with very interesting wrestling-inspired combat moves, which are used not only to fight but also for navigation. And for the first several hours it works like that, sadly loosing most of it's own identity with unending references to other games and internet memes. Then it tries to become Super Meat Boy in navigation (forgetting that the beauty of "precision" platformers lies in simplistic but responsive controls). And then it decides to "add variety" to combat by making enemies have a special shield, that can be broken only by very specific special moves. And everything falls apart. Navigation becomes a huge pain in the arse, by using confusing number different buttons and combinations to succeed,. Fighting becomes a chore, especially since it never truly evolves past the moves you do in the beginning and makes enemies just last longer and hit harder. I'm sure, there are players, who wanted exactly this - unnecessarily complex precision platforming and (clunky) long wrestling combat in a metroidvania game. But even those people will need to play through half a different game to get to what they want.

It´s short and entertaining. But getting the good ending or a 100% completion is not worth it due to how fckin hard some challenges and platforming sections are. Yes, you are very welcome to think that maybe I just suck, but even the comments from the video guides I watched or the authors of the videos themselves said you just need luck to complete some of the challenges.

Quite pretty and interesting, sadly the controls are not exactly responsive enough to carry the reaction requirement. Re-trying short segments of platforming over and over again got too frustrating for me to finish the game, despite being fairly apt at the genre. I would also advise against even trying to play the game without a gamepad.