Recent reviews by Femboy Tharja

Legitimately one of my favorite releases so far this year. Every weapon feels good and useful, the visuals are all rad, the music's solid. The indie/retro market getting a spiritual successor to Guardian Legend is long overdue, and I couldn't have asked for a better one.

So, genuinely, I think the original game holds up very well! That ain't the issue here.

The issue here is that I bought a retro game to support the release of retro games, and I got a motion comic cutscene that went "man nobody cares about old games without things like motion comic cutscenes getting added!" This is a solid game in a release by people who are BAFFLED at the idea that someone might want to just play it without three hundred layers of irony on top of it.

I definitely think you should play the original game, mind you! Just...not in this release. There's been a fan translation around for decades that's not hard to find and is honestly a bit better.

Do you like puns? If so, consider this an immediate purchase!

It's a neat little dungeon-crawler, full of weird little quirks and jokes and a couple okay puzzles here and there. Once you learn about the dodging mechanic, it's fairly easy, but there's still a good number of little secrets and details that make it worth running through.

With the DLC it's a bit over two hours long-I didn't 100% the game, but I came darn close. It's a pretty tightly designed two hours, though. Charming little piece, and extremely recommended if "typing game based on classic Japanese first-person dungeon crawlers" sounds like it's up your alley.

The best album of 2021, there is also a really solid fighting game attached I guess

I really hate to say "No" on this one, because I like these devs otherwise and I like Giana, and I like this game. But it wasn't anywhere near ready for release.

At its core, it's a pretty basic platformer, with its similarities to Mario still very present in this incarnation (they'd be pretty much gone by Twisted Dreams, but they're still in full force here). It has a lot of levels, it has some really nice music. The lack of a sprint/run button is a bit of a shame, but it doesn't break the game. A bit worse is a real lack of level variety, with very little to make areas stand out.

The problem is that the game is busted in weird, weird ways. There's a few little things that are weird, but harmless (achievements not popping until the game closes, the score counter starting at 12 million points for whatever reason, stage numbering on the loading screen is weird) and a few things that are annoying but not dealbreakers (menu controls could be more responsive, some achievements don't work), but the big issue is level progression is very weird, in ways that I've never seen before.

Put like this: When I played 1-1 for the first time, it crashed at the end. Reloading it and playing 1-1 again, it loaded a wholly different level...and then loaded it AGAIN for 1-2, and beating it again took me to 1-3. I quit to the map, reloaded 1-1, and got the first level again...and then clearing it again and going back to the map revealed that my progress hadn't been saved and I had to redo 1-2. This happened again with 1-8 and 1-9, 2-1 and 2-2, and 2-9 was a level from a later world altogether until I relaunched the game entirely and got the actual level with the boss. For all I know, I've missed a few levels and not realized it, due to the game's loading the wrong ones.

If they fixed that, the other stuff'd be easy enough to overlook, but as it is I can't say this is ready to be bought or sold. I'll happily redo this entire little writeup the moment it no longer applies.

I feel like maybe I'm not qualified to write a negative review on this, since I only had a few hours' play, and only played casually, and presumably I'd be fine continuing playing like that for a good while longer without the changes to the game having that much effect on my experience.

But the heck with that-I still spent money on it, and on its DLC, and what they've done this past week is make sure I'm not going back to it. They've made it clear they cannot actually be trusted (not only by adding microtransactions after saying, multiple times, they would not-but by going out there and claiming they were too busy to address the community even while boasting that their team now sports 75 employees-can't imagine all 75 of them were busy adding Crimefest masks!-and claiming the microtransactions were necessary, even as they were also reporting major profits beforehand). They've made it clear the concerns of the playerbase don't matter as much as the dollars of the Steam Marketplace's opportunists.

And it stinks! It stinks because, even though my playtime doesn't measure up to a lot of people's, I can tell you there was a real good game here once, that a lot of work and passion went into. At the present point in time, that game is still under there. It could be that game again, honestly, and it wouldn't be that much work. It'd probably be more profitable for them in the long run. I'd love to edit this review to reflect that such a thing happened.

I don't think I'm going to have to. I think we're going to see this company move further away from what worked and what drew people to them in the first place, and the traces of a well-made title in this are going to get buried under more and more nonsense looking for a few extra bucks. I hope I'm proven wrong on this.

Either way-as it stands, this game is not in a place where you should buy it right now.

I wanted to like this thing! I did! And I gave it a reasonable shot, I suspect. But honestly, it's just not that great.

Conceptually, the game's fine. Action horror first-person, focus on melee, dealing with both real-world and gross-horror type monsters. All that should've been fine.

The big problems are three-fold. First, combat is never particularly tense or challenging-with the exception of one or two points in chapter three (where you find some guys with guns), I was never in any real danger. Part of this is what I assume is a carryover from DS hardware: Only a few enemies appear on-screen at once. This results in combat-heavy rooms becoming a slog through groups of one or two enemies, who die to be immediately replaced by one or two identical enemies. Weapon damage seems seriously unbalanced, too-the knife and pistol seemed to offer considerably bigger damage then later, slower or more ammo-scarce items. If an enemy doesn't have a projectile, there's no reason not to just rush it and slice it up.

Second, there's not much of any plot to speak of. The game hints around at a few things: Eldritch terrors set loose upon an asylum and village, the main character having some sort of tie to it, dark experiments happening, cults, presumed dead people still being alive somewhere-and then there's a ridiculous non-ending. It would have, in all seriousness, been better served with a "congratulations!" screen and the credits being the only thing following the final boss.

Third, it's sorta buggy. I personally experienced: One cutscene crash-to-desktop, one bottomless void that cost me twenty minutes of backtracking from the last save when I accidentally brushed against a doorway, two achievements that did not unlock for killing the end boss (and several kill-X-monsters-with-this-weapon one that unlocked several kills later, or early in two cases), my gamepad vibrating after I turned that option off, the game not saving resolution or window/fullscreen preferences, and my first attempt at playing requiring a restart because the game decided against recognizing input from anything except basic movement.

From what I've read, your mileage will vary in that third category (and at the time of this writing it still seems to be in the middle of getting cleaned up). Getting rid of that, though, it remains a game with tedious encounters and just enough minor plot references that it's honestly a bit infuriating when nothing comes of them. I found just enough to like that I didn't give up on it, but sad to say your time is just spent better elsewhere.

I'm going to feel like such a nitpicky jerk talking about this game's flaws, because everything else is just really good. But we'll get to them.

Guacamelee! is a muscular Metroidvania, a world where the mask is a very literal symbol of strength and the powerups are sealed behind openings that only ancient body-press techniques will open. Its world is a bit more linear then some Metroidvania-inspired titles, but there's still a pretty solid amount of nooks and crannies to break open and revisit with new tricks.

Just about all of your movement or "unlocking" abilities are combat-oriented-the blue doors are unlocking by dash-punching, for instance, giving you regular new tricks in fights. Things that don't move you tend to move enemies, so you're almost always able to keep a combo going, either by reaching someone or hurling someone into a distant group. The fights are fast and fluid, and a little bit of dimension-changing thrown in offers a manageable issue that'll still keep you on your toes.

The platforming's fine, too-just as some enemies only exist in one of the dimensions, so do some blocks and walls, making you keep switching to get past things, have safe landing points, etc. When it flows, it's a real joy to bounce around the game.

Problem #1 is that it doesn't always flow, though. Hazards (spikes, nasty water, thorns, etc.) tend to have a pretty big hitbox, and even nearly-but-not-quite grazing something can send you spiraling to the ground below-this is a real pain in the ass on vertical segments, especially since there's no safe-fall. Thankfully, these are few and far between. Still, though, landing in water or falling off into a pit teleports you to solid ground, immediately-it's actually worse to land on a platform below where you were. A strange choice.

Problem #2 is that our hero, Juan, presumably a técnico, has a pile driver move. He really shouldn't-that's for rudos.

Those are nitpicks, though. Overall, the game's just fantastic. If you need a sidescroller, this thing deserves a place in your library.