Bottom Line: Tunche is one of the best-looking beat 'em ups you can buy, a storybook come to life with a killer four-player couch mode—but its roguelite scaffolding is thin, and solo players will hit the wall before the credits.
The Gameplay Loop
Tunche's core loop is arcade DNA modernized. You enter a room, a wave of enemies spawns, you clear it, you move on. Between rooms you choose a branch on a small map—more combat, a shop, a shrine, a boss. Clear a world, fight its guardian, unlock a little more of the story and a few more permanent upgrades. Die, and you cash out your progress into meta-currency and start again a fraction stronger.
What elevates this above button-mashing is the grade system. Combat isn't just about clearing the screen; it's about clearing it beautifully. Chain attacks, dodge at the right frame, mix your moveset, and your grade climbs—and with it, your rewards. It's a smart hook borrowed from character-action games like Devil May Cry, scaled down for a brawler. When the combat sings, you feel like a jungle-spirit conductor, weaving between enemies, never touching the ground.
Here's the problem: the song is short. Tunche's enemy variety is limited, and you feel it fast. The roster of foes and the four-world structure mean that after a few hours you've seen most of what the game will throw at you. The grade system encourages expressive play, but expressive play needs a rich vocabulary of threats to stay interesting, and Tunche's dictionary is thin. Solo, over longer sessions, the combat curdles from stylish to repetitive. You start going through the motions—literally the same motions—against the same silhouettes.
Roguelite Depth, or the Lack of It
This is where I have to be firm. Tunche wears the roguelite badge, but it doesn't earn it the way the genre's leaders do. The between-run upgrades exist, and they do make you stronger, but they rarely make each run feel meaningfully different. There's no rich tapestry of build permutations—no moment where a random drop rewrites your entire strategy. Runs vary in room order, not in identity. Compared to the systemic depth of the games it's implicitly measured against, Tunche's roguelite layer feels like a structural convenience—a way to justify replaying a short campaign—rather than a genuine engine of emergent play.
And the campaign is short. That's not automatically a flaw; plenty of great games respect your time. But when the pitch is "roguelite replayability," a thin content base and shallow progression systems undercut the very reason you'd come back. The game asks you to grind through familiar rooms with only modest mechanical novelty as the carrot.
Where It Actually Shines
Put three friends on the couch, though, and every one of those criticisms softens. Co-op is Tunche's true genre. The repetition matters less when you're shouting at a friend who just stole your kill. The thin enemy variety matters less when the real content is the four of you improvising, colliding, reviving each other in the last second. The gorgeous art becomes a shared spectacle. Tunche isn't a deep solo roguelite pretending to be a party game—it's a party game that happens to have roguelite bones, and it's genuinely excellent in that role. The onboarding is frictionless; a non-gamer can grab a controller and be laughing within thirty seconds. That accessibility is a real achievement, and LEAP deserves credit for it.