Guacamelee! 2

Guacamelee! 2 is a Metroidvania with its fists up. Drinkbox Studios returned to their luchador universe and built something denser, louder, and more mechanically demanding than the first game. You play as Juan, a masked wrestler who punches, grapples, and dimension-hops his way through hand-crafted levels soaked in Mexican folk art and visual noise that somehow never tips into chaos. The world design is the headline here: every corridor and hidden alcove feels like someone made a deliberate decision about where to put it. That kind of intentionality is rare, and it shows. The combat is the other reason to show up. New luchador moves layer on top of the original toolkit, and the game is not shy about demanding you use all of them. Later platforming gauntlets ask you to chain dashes, wall-runs, and body slams in rapid sequence, and the feedback when you nail a long room is genuinely satisfying in a way that few brawler-platformers manage. The bosses are well-designed confrontations with distinct patterns, and a handful of them are legitimately sassy in the best way. Enemy variety has been expanded meaningfully from the first entry, and the chicken-related content (yes, the developers were serious about that) is exactly as absurd as it sounds. The humor is loud and referential. The game leans into internet-age jokes and meta gags that land in 2018 context, though a few will feel more dated now depending on your tolerance for that kind of thing. The narrative is not the main draw, but it does enough to keep the world feeling alive and to justify the new stakes. The dialogue has charm without demanding you care deeply about lore, which is the right call for a game that mostly wants you moving and hitting things. Where the game earns real praise from me is in its audiovisual craft. The pixel art is dense with personality, character animations are fluid and expressive, and the soundtrack understands how to match the energy of a fight without becoming exhausting. There is a warmth to the color palette and a specificity to the cultural aesthetic that feels respectful rather than surface-level. A smaller indie might have made this world feel like a borrowed setting. Drinkbox made it feel like a place. The honest caveats: co-op exists and can be fun, but the camera struggles when players separate, and the late-game difficulty spikes are steep enough to frustrate players who are not fully committed to mastering the move set. The opening hours feel slightly padded if you played the first game recently, since re-establishing the combat vocabulary takes longer than it needs to. And if pure narrative is what you want from a Metroidvania, this is not the game for that. But if you want a world that was obviously built with care, combat that rewards practice, and the particular pleasure of a sequel that knows what made the original work, Guacamelee! 2 holds up.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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