A malevolent spirit resides in the mystical rainforests of Amazonia. Legends say there is a force that balances light and darkness, but the scales have been tipped too far to one side. Once kind creatures have been possessed by the powers of evil and seek to destroy all those who enter the rainforest. Five heroes, brought together by fate and the search for answers, delve into the Amazon to restore balance.
As a fast paced, well drawn beat-em-up game, Tunche provides some magical fun even if it’s short lived.
There are four different regions to explore, each offering different enemies to fight and ending with a boss. The gameplay stays true to traditional beat-em-up style games where the combat is easy to learn, but complex enough to string together combos. There is a style meter that measures how well I was doing and also keeps track of me using different moves. This also means the game incentivises players to experiment with different combos rather than mashing the same button over and over.
Each region has a couple levels to play through and offers different paths to take which provide various power-ups and currencies. If I needed more gold or wanted to gather upgrade materials, I could go down one path; or if I wanted to find a vendor, I might choose a different way. This helps spice things up even if I was still taking a linear path to the end of the region. Temporary upgrades, referred to as spirit cores, could be acquired as I progressed. These provided interesting attributes such as a speed increase when my style meter reached a certain level and enabling passive healing when my health dropped below a certain point. Stacking these spirit cores gave me a great increase in power, and I always looked forward to finding more.
There are five different characters I could pick from, each with their own set of moves and upgrades to acquire. The first four are local Amazonia; the fifth is a crossover character from the game “A Hat In Time”. During most of my time, I used Rumi, a young shaman accompanied by her avian familiar Piu. I found her to be most interesting because all of her attacks incorporate her bird in some way.
There were quite a few moves to be unlocked, although I didn’t really need most of them. The most important upgrades I found were the ones that increased my health and my damage. By the time I defeated the final boss, I had only unlocked about a third of the abilities on offer, partially because they weren’t really that necessary.
One of the other reasons I didn’t spend too much time on upgrades is due to the nature of the game’s progression. Upgrades can only be made at the base camp, which is the starting area. There is no way to return to this area without losing all of your progress and having to re-complete every stage.
When each level has essentially the same enemies and layouts, there isn’t much incentive to want to go back and do them over again. I think this also creates a problem for repeat playthroughs because each of the five characters need to be upgraded individually. Outside of collecting more lore pages to learn more about the characters, I didn’t really feel I needed or wanted to complete the game over and over again. That isn’t to say the levels and enemies aren’t fun to engage with; it can just get repetitive at times.
Narratively, there isn’t much to offer, which tends to be typical for this genre. It’s more about how fun the game is rather than how deep the story goes, but there is some available if players go looking for it. During some parts of the regions, I had the option of going to a special path that contained information about my characters past, which was illustrated through a comic-book style cutscene. Each character has their own stories to collect and helps provide a bit more narrative to those who may be looking for it.
During my playthrough I encountered a handful of bugs, ranging from small visual glitches to larger issues that hampered my progress significantly. To start, sometimes the graphics during loading screens would glitch out, and enemies I already defeated would stay on the screen.
These screens seemed to be a struggle for this game. There were a couple times where the game would just crash after finishing loading the next area. The worst bug I ran into had enemies drifting off the screen, which locked me out of progressing. Either they would slowly slide out of the level never to return, or they just wouldn’t spawn — meaning I couldn’t complete the level, and I would need to restart the software. Thankfully there was a checkpoint system so I wouldn’t lose too much progress, but it became very grating after the sixth time I had to re-do the same level.
“Tunche” is one of those games I had a good time while playing, but still had some frustration in completing. With only four regions, it doesn’t take much time to complete, though it would take longer for someone wanting to complete and upgrade each character. This game can also be played with friends, which makes for some hectic fun as you slay out against hordes of monsters.
If you’re able to look past some of the simplistic design choices, and the developers take care of some of the more troublesome bugs, I think there is still a fun game underneath. With a respectable price point of $20, this can be a fun game to open up and play — even if it is a bit of a short experience.
