Guacamelee 2 (

2018

)

This is effectively the same game as Guacamelee [2013], warts and all, with one notable exception: The humor. Guacamelee [2013] was about as funny as prostate cancer, but that didn't stop the developer from peppering in a hefty helping of failed jokes and lame-ass references. For those of you who didn't play Guacamelee [2013] or didn't read my review of it, imagine the jokes from Borderlands 2 [2012] with less subtly and wit and you won't be far off from the overall tone. Unfortunately, the guys at Drinkbox have beaten the odds and somehow gotten the impression that they are actually funny because they've plastered the sequel with jokes that are even lamer and ever more numerous than the original's. Such delusions certainly can't be from encouragement they received from their player base because they added an entire level with the sole purpose of chastising the detractors who called out how stupid, lazy, and unfunny their attempt at humor was. A word of advice for the guys at Drinkbox: Next time your players tell you something sucks, maybe take that as constructive criticism rather than doubling down and making a worse game out of spite. Perhaps I'm being unfair, after all, Drinkbox is composed entirely of Canadians, and one look at the current pop-culture landscape will quickly prove that Canada is effectively The Land that Jokes Forgot. How else could you explain the offensively unfunny comic writer Ryan North (of Squirrel Girl and dinosaur comics fame)? Or the lame attempts at humor in Canadian developed indie games like Celeste [2018] or Night in the Woods [2017]? Or the veritable struggle session that is Samantha Bee's late-night show? Aside from Norm Macdonald, is there a single living comedian from The People's Republic of Canuckistan that doesn't have quotation marks around their title? Such a dearth of humor from our Northern neighbor is a natural result of speech policing rampant political correctness. The same plague that is in the process of ravaging American humor has already laid waste to all jokes north of the 49th parallel. Hopefully, we'll get a few more years of occasionally uncomfortable jokes before Political Correctness wins the war on comedy and we're left pretending that the occasional misplaced chicken is hilarious.

That said, the game remains otherwise unchanged from the first entry, which in-and-of-itself is a mixed blessing. On one hand, there was nothing that bad about the underlying formula of Guacamelee [2013]; it was a pretty mediocre Metroidvania with some flashy graphics and tight platforming sections. Personally, I find it almost impossible to be completely negative about any halfway decent Metroidvania, there's just something about the formula that rubs me the right way. I can always slap on a podcast, ignore the main quest and meticulously scavenge the world for powerups, bonuses, and secrets. The only problem is that the developers at Drinkbox used up all their ideas in the first Guacamelee [2013] and couldn't be bothered to dream up any new innovations. All of your luchador moves remain unchanged from the first game (though apparently in the last few years the term “Derp” was deemed a bit too spicy by the Canadian Comedy Ministry so the dashing derpderp was renamed to something utterly forgettable). A few new throws were added, but these were completely worthless in combat as it's almost always better to spam special attacks. The only real gameplay innovation, the options to purchase upgrades to your character from a series of mentors, quickly removes any real challenge from the main storyline. Being able to take multiple hits before a combo is interrupted in particular is a change that effectively robs the combat of any real challenge and soon I was wracking up triple-digit combos without even paying much attention to the game. Indeed, what had been a source of considerable challenge in the original Guacamelee [2013], became just another unfunny joke. Towards the end of the game, there's even a chance to get a 999 hit combo with absolutely no effort, just to trivialize any attempt at getting a high score. The powered-up special attacks are less game-breaking but still trivialize most combat sections.

Worse than the copy-pasted gameplay though is the fact that Drinkbox had no idea how to continue the story of the previous game, having to resort to the old multiverse nonsense that is usually the domain of utterly stagnant franchises. When we last left our hero Juan, a Mexican wrestler with a reverse Hitler mustache, he had beaten the bad guy, gotten the girl, and saved the world. Juan's arch was about as complete as it was gonna get, so tapping him for the protagonist in the sequel seems like a mistake right from the start. Why not set the game further along in the future, when Juan has become a legend and follow a young Luchador seeking his guidance in a quest to best his rival and save his girl? Give us a hero with something to lose, and some motivation beyond the nebulous “save all the timelines” crap. It's not like a good story couldn't be told about Juan, if the developers were dead set on having him as the hero once again. He could have grown soft after his victory over Calca, and in the opening tutorial, he could lose his title to a shadowy challenger Rocky III (1982) style. The rest of the game could revolve around his quest to build himself up again and retake the championship belt. Either approach would have worked but that would have taken the developers too far out of their comfort zone, so instead, we're left with what amounts to a repeat of the first game's story. Most of the action focuses around a race to save the world from Salvador, a bad guy whose sole personality trait is a proclivity for hiding his cough by claiming to have just eaten something and gotten it stuck in his throat. The game toys with giving Salvador a tragic backstory, but immediately undercuts it with its stupid jokes. The luchador's adoptive mother sings a tearful song about how her charge turned to evil only to cut off at the end with a dead meme: “anyway, here's wonderwall.” Salvador's henchmen are even dumber than their master, each with a personality that consists of a single trait. This wouldn't be so bad if they could shut the fuck up occasionally, but instead, each story sequence treats us to endless droning from these non-entities.

The art style, once again, is bright and vibrant and rather charming. However, unlike the first game, there has been almost no effort made to make each distinct zone distinguishable from one another. The temples are all identical, and if I was plopped down in any one of them I doubt I'd be able to tell you which one I was in. The outside world is just one long pastel blur, so repetitive that I found it difficult to remember which town was which when I needed to go back for a quest. Just about the only part that sticks out in my memory is the frozen-over wasteland of hell. Occasionally you'll jump through a portal and go to another timeline, and sometimes these will have their own distinct look and feel, usually ripping off the style from another game in a lame attempt of parody. These sections are all annoying without exception, but at least they break up the monotony somewhat.

What hasn't remained utterly unchanged seems to have devolved. Collision detection has taken a serious hit, and it seems like spikes kill you a moment before you impact with them. This is only a trifling problem in the main game, where the platforming difficulty will seldom rise to any serious level of challenge, but quickly becomes insufferable in the game's optional challenges. Indeed in the hidden chicken temple, the final optional area, the difficulty level shifted from tough but fair to tough but fuck you. This was not enough to stop me from clearing the section mind you, but it was more than sufficient to make me annoyed at all the bullshit the game was throwing my way.

The general feel of Guacamelee 2 is one of laziness, lazy humor, lazy level-design, lazy story, lazy mechanics. However, what troubles me more than any of that laziness is the slovenly attitude the game takes towards the culture it is supposedly paying homage to. All the references to Mexican culture feel forced and surface level, take for instance the macguffin of the whole game: the sacred Guacamole. It feels like something someone with only the barest knowledge of Mexican culture would reach for in a moment of desperation. You're telling me that no item in Mexican folklore would be a better fit, and you were stuck using an appetizer? It's not just the sacred guacamole though, everything here feels so forced and surface level. Sure, the one enemy that is a crow perched on top of a cactus is a reference to Mexican folklore, but there's no reason to use this particular legend in this particular way. It feels cheap and almost exploitative. I would invite the members of Drinkbox to consider for a moment, in the extremely unlikely event that any of them read this blog, how they would feel about a Mexican development team that was making a game called Pow-Tine about a Mounty that fights with a hockey stick battling corrupted curling players with the power of the legendary cup of Tim Horton's coffee. Sound dumb? It's pretty much what you guys did with Guacamelee [2013] and its sequel.