There are problems in the Amazon. All fauna is corrupted and the jungle has become a much more dangerous place. Monstrous animals with a thirst for blood prowl the humid landscape. In this brawler with elements roguelike, the mission of our five protagonists is to enter the jungle to find Tunche, a mysterious being whose motivations are unknown, and thus save the Amazon and stop corruption.
Tunche It is available for PC, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.
A VARIOUS AND UNIQUE CAST
For our adventure in the Amazon, we can choose between five characters: Rumi, the shaman who plays the role of magician or “caster”, with magical attacks and strong projectiles. Pancho, with a big name and a big heart, the good-natured giant plays music and hits hard. Qaru, the bird boy with wings on his arms, very agile and mobile. Nayra, the warrior who possesses a spear that can turn into a serpent at will. And Hat Kid, from the well-known platform game A Hat in Time, which for some reason is here and feels like the most balanced option. They are all so different from each other both in appearance and in the way they are played, that they add the necessary variety to the title so that we have an option for all tastes.
Everyone has their own motivations for entering the Amazon, and their own personal stories that will be revealed as we play with each one. It feels so cool to see a game with such a beautiful art style and such a unique setting. It is definitely the strong point of this title. The characters look very cute and in perfect harmony with their environment, even Hat Kid who is the one who most contrasts with the rest, shares the same style in a totally correct way. You can see that the game and all its graphics are made with a lot of love, that is reflected in how beautiful everything looks in the Amazon jungle and its characters. It also feels great, for a change, to watch a game set in South America.
PINEAPPLE GOES, PINEAPPLE COMES
We start the game in our camp, before venturing we must choose a character to visit this place that serves as a hub. When you return between each attempt, here will be all NPCs that allow us to obtain improvements with the rewards of each run. The levels are divided into small rooms in which we fight against at least two waves of enemies. At the end of the level we can choose different paths to follow, varying the reward of each next level. In between we can also access shops (where we can heal ourselves, replenish potions and buy orbs with passive bonuses) and challenges, the latter being really challenging. Unfortunately, there is not much incentive to do these challenges, the rewards are very few and to be able to participate you have to pay, in addition to the fact that we can fail and die finishing the run right there.
The combat in Tunche is all we expect from a good brawler, many enemies to defeat and many tools at our fingertips to do so. The bad thing is that with each character we start with less than half of the total abilities since we must unlock them, thus starting with very few combat tools in the first few runs. While each character has different stats, they all have the same basic mechanics. Combos of three hits that end in knockout, projectiles that are fired up to twice in a row at first and a special attack that launches enemies into the air, where we can jump and continue our combos. We also have an action to dodge that is very useful to evade attacks and move fast, although some characters have this action so slow that jumping and moving in the air is faster. Combos can be upgraded to add finishing blows to them. The projectile upgrade adds a third with different effect depending on the character. And for everyone we can then choose between two special attacks that would work as one “Ultimate”, Very powerful and that we can use quite often luckily. All these mechanics work together very well, giving us extensive freedom to combine attacks and do the most crazy maneuvers, to the point that we can gather enemies in a great mass and keep them in an infinite combo, if we know how to do it.
In addition to our classic life bar, we have a mana bar, which we use for special attacks and projectiles. Mana feels more of a formality than anything else, as we regain mana by hitting our enemies. And since it does not pay only to use projectiles but to vary what we do in the combos, it is difficult for us to run out of little mana. Speaking of adding variety to our combos, it is important to do so as the game has a stylish combo system very similar to Devil may cry, and if we finish a level with a high rank we will have a better reward of Entrophy, a currency with which we can buy improvements later. In order to survive we have a number of potions in our inventory as well, which we can improve as we advance to carry more and heal better.
The enemies have a design with a quality equivalent to that of the main characters and the environment, all are native animals of the Amazon a little more monstrous due to the corruption that affects the area. The bad thing is that they do not do much, whenever they are going to attack they telegraph it, giving us time to dodge or counter attack them in most cases, they are usually in many numbers and are at first quite hard to eliminate. To help us with this the game has a critical hit system. These hits are activated when we attack an enemy from behind and do double the damage, so strategizing to do the most critical hits is vital to finish the fights quickly. Some enemies launch projectiles or explode as kamikaze, so knowing how to identify and prioritize these most dangerous enemies is important to avoid damage. In general the enemies hit hard and if we get distracted we can lose the run very fast, the game really encourages you to be untouchable.
We can acquire some orbs that will give us some passive ability that works only in one run. They get better at camp later. The problem is that although there are not many, there are really few that serve, to the point that if we grab some of the good ones early, it is almost certain that that run let’s go far.
The problem with the gameplay loop in this title is that it gets repetitive very quickly. After a few runs that we play we will feel that we are doing the same combos and fighting with the same enemies, without much variety. At the same time, and for that matter this is something personal, already in the third game in a row the rhythm tires me a bit. If I don’t unlock something meaningful to keep moving forward or make my character stronger, I have to take a break from the game for a bit.
These problems, however, are not so present if we play co-op. In my experience the game does not seem to be balanced to get more difficult the more players we are. So cooperating with one or more friends with whom we coordinate the offense will make the game less repetitive and more fun. Being able to clear the levels quickly is much more satisfying. I also noticed this when improving the characters, the damage numbers seemed little to me, but with minimal improvements the time it took to defeat the enemies was reduced. You could also say that the game is not easier in multiplayer, but that the real difficult mode is to play alone.
Luckily the bossfights are a charm. At the end of each area we are going to face a very challenging enemy, all based on mythological beings that inhabit the Amazon. These are very well represented and excellently designed visually. The fights with these bosses are challenging but have well-defined mechanics, so learning and repeating them never stops being fun. In addition, each time we defeat a new one, it will enable us to unlock passive skills that will immediately make our characters much stronger.
ROGUE, ROGUE, ROGUE DE LA SELVA
The elements roguelike of this title do not always work in the best way. In any game if this is not excellent and well balanced, most of the time it creates frustrating situations. happens in most classic roguelikes, but today it was something that Hades eliminated in his gameplay and left the bar very high for the rest in the future. Tunche could have been a brawler and worked very well like that, however, despite some issues that could be solved with some balance adjustments, the game and the roguelike experience are still enjoyable.
The most objectionable thing about this is that the rewards and different currencies that the game gives us at the end of a level are very scarce. As of this writing, they patched the game to increase the amount of experience we gain, and yet it is still one of the most necessary and most difficult things to farm. It is good and speaks well of the devs who listen to the players and adjust the game to make the experience better. It is precisely this problem of not being able to gain experience for the characters easily, because each character is improved separately, despite the fact that the skill tree, saving very few differences, is almost the same for each one. If it was better balanced, I would not see it as much of a problem, since it encourages playing the different characters separately. But in the current state of the game, it is a lot of time investment in farming resources with a gameplay that falls into being repetitive.
As we move forward and unlock new areas, new areas will also be added NPCs to the camp with more improvements to offer us. The bad thing is that everything asks for some type of resource, and these are still scarce. Luckily we will eventually have a nice llama (called Leo, who is also the one who offers us the challenges) that will allow us to exchange currencies each other to facilitate this.
There are some technical flaws that luckily they are fixing them little by little. More than once it happened to me that an enemy was stuck off-screen and could not advance, or that a boss took me out of the map by pushing me. In both cases the solution was none other than to finish the run manually, which is not ideal if we have been progressing well. Also some hitboxes A few enemies could be adjusted, some hit from farther than it seems, and other enemies do not telegraph their attacks as clearly or do it very quickly. I read that this kind of bugs They happened to several players so it would not be an isolated case.
System Requirements
OS: Windows 7 – Processor: Intel Core2 Duo E8400, 3.0GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+, 3.0GHz or higher – Memory: 4 GB of RAM – Graphics: Geforce 9600 GT or AMD HD 3870 512MB or higher – Storage: 5 GB of available space
Sound card: DirectX®-compatible