I’m someone who has never been a fan of beat ‘em ups, but I still like to think I can give them an objective review. I may not like a genre, but I can still recognize quality, like with the game I beat today:

• Guacamelee! Gold Edition
  

  5 hours playtime

  30 of 60 achievements

This is a beat ‘em up platformer. Along with your standard left/right movement and jump ability, you have a punch button that lets you perform three-hit combos on enemies. As you progress, you’ll gain more attacks like an uppercut or a dash attack. Some abilities help out with the platforming aspect, while others are just new attacks that can also break certain blocks and certain enemy shields.

Being part beat ‘em up, the main game-play mechanic is fighting enemies, usually in flat or mostly flat arenas, and of course, the enemies themselves won’t hurt you; only their attacks deal damage. The game has a decent variety of enemies, but the challenge comes less from the enemies themselves and more from lock-down arenas where you have to fight waves of multiple enemies at once, each of them on their own timers attacking asynchronously. I’ve never been a fan of beat ‘em ups since it always takes a bit too long to defeat enemies (even bosses seem to have a bit too much health at times); you’ll be pummeling one, when suddenly another in the crowd hits you from behind, which of course knocks you on the ground for a moment and lets the first enemy recover its shield. Needless to say, I ran past almost all enemies that weren’t in a lock-down arena.

One positive thing I can say is that your dodge move will interrupt any of your other moves, so you can always dodge if you’re quick enough (this is something I wish other games did more often).

For this game in particular, the most annoying part of the lock-down fights are when a bomb appears. They take just as many hits to kill as any ordinary enemy, but they do nothing but count down; if it reaches zero, the screen flashes and you take damage. In other words, you’re just standing there tapping the attack button until they die, unless you don’t reach them fast enough, at which point you still tap the attack button a bunch but also take damage when they explode. There are even a few times where bombs will appear while you’re in the middle of fighting other enemies (as opposed to appearing at the start of a wave like normal), so you have to stop what you’re doing and go take out the bomb, but bombs by themselves are always the most annoying. There’s even an arena near the end that’s nothing but bombs, except these are a new type of bomb that kills you if they explode. Luckily, these bombs get killed in one hit, but the game makes up for this by having a bunch of bombs appear for the later waves.

What separates beat ‘em up platformers from regular action platformers is not only the fact that the game frequently goes into lock-down and forces you to fight waves of enemies that take just a bit too long to kill, but also the fact that the whole platforming aspect of the platformer is heavily downplayed. To be fair, there are a few moments of tricky platforming during the late-game (even a couple with enemies that shoot projectiles), but if you fall or get knocked into a bottomless pit, you get teleported to the last platform you were on with no negative consequences. Not to the beginning of the room, not even with a small drop in health, but literally the last platform you were on without consequence. Not only does this remove much of the challenge platformers normally have, but this makes it a viable strategy to throw yourself off of cliffs in order to avoid enemy attacks. Heck, one of the easiest lock-down segments was an arena that made the mistake of having a pit on the left side: I just kinda stood around there, luring enemies toward me, then knocking them into the pit to kill them since it didn’t matter if I fell off or not (which I did, several times).

The game also has a light/dark world mechanic, but it never gets more complicated than “hit the swap-worlds button at the right time” while moving past walls.

Overall, this is a pretty good game, but it isn’t for everyone. If you like beat ‘em ups and are at least begrudgingly accepting of platformers, you’ll enjoy this, but if you’re like me and you’ve never been a fan of beat ‘em ups, give it a pass.