Unruly Heroes

I came to Unruly Heroes looking for something to play with three other people on the couch, and what I got was one of the prettier action-platformers of the last several years wrapped around mechanics that are mostly solid but occasionally frustrating. The setup is a loose, comedic riff on Journey to the West: four warriors, Wukong the agile monkey king, Sanzang the drowsy monk, Kihong the greedy pig, and Sandmonk the hulking brute, are hunting fragments of a shattered Sacred Scroll across a hand-painted fantasy world. The studio is staffed partly by Rayman Legends veterans, and that lineage shows in every background, every fluid idle animation, and every enemy silhouette. It genuinely looks like a playable animated film at times. The core loop is character-swapping puzzle platforming across 29 levels, each running roughly 4 to 15 minutes. Solo, you cycle between all four heroes on the fly; in local co-op, each player locks into one. The mechanical differences between characters matter in the right places: Wukong has the best double jump and a staff that can become a bridge or projectile blocker, Sandmonk is your short-range bruiser who smashes through stone walls with bare hands, Kihong can inflate his body into a balloon to float through high passages, and Sanzang bounces energy projectiles off walls to hit levers. Character-specific statues peppered through each level unlock these special abilities and form the spine of the puzzle design. When the game locks two or three of these mechanics into a single challenge, it clicks. Outside of those moments, though, the incentive to switch is softer than it should be, if you find a character you like, you can lean on them for longer than the design probably intends. Combat carries more than 20 attacks and combos per character, and the kung-fu choreography looks spectacular. However, depth is thinner than the move count implies. Boss encounters are the highlight: screen-filling multi-stage fights against oversized anthropomorphic creatures that reward reading attack patterns. The final stretch ramps difficulty hard and starts punishing platforming misreads with instant death, which some players will find exciting and others will find an abrupt tonal shift after a relatively forgiving first half. Dead characters leave a soul bubble that teammates can revive, a smart system that keeps runs alive without completely defanging consequences. On the multiplayer side, the story here is mixed. Four-player local co-op across all 29 levels is genuinely good fun and the reason to pick this up if you have the bodies in the room. The PvP mode, local and online, is a small-arena brawler that feels bolted on; the platform combat moveset does not naturally translate to head-to-head competition and the mode lacks the structure or balance work that would make it worth repeat visits. No online co-op is the bigger sting for anyone whose squad is spread across cities. Progression is thin: coins unlock character skins (four per hero) and hidden scrolls unlock artwork, but there is no upgrade system, no ranked ladder, nothing pulling you back mechanically once you finish the campaign. The per-level bronze, silver, and gold rating system plus a harder Diamond tier added post-launch give completionists a reason to revisit, but that is a narrow audience. Unruly Heroes earns a recommendation for couch co-op households and anyone who wants a beautiful, well-paced platformer with clever puzzle design, just go in knowing the PvP is a footnote, the story is thin, and the back half will test your patience before the credits roll.

Fred · Scout Team

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