[h1]Machick: 8.9h | 100% Achievements (24/24) Completed | Not Recommended[/h1]
[i]I came expecting a magical world with magic chickens. I left with 83 crafted wands I've never used, a mute button, and a profound understanding of what "lukewarm" means.[/i]
[h1]Achievement Breakdown[/h1]
[b]Grindy Achievements:[/b] Yes (~3). [i][u]"Craft 20/50/100 Wands"[/u][/i] are the worst, you'll craft around 10-15 organically, then spam random wands to complete the rest.
[b]Missable Achievements:[/b] No.
[b]Difficult Achievements:[/b] No. The game is really easy; the 100% is just boring.
[h1]What is Machick About?[/h1]
[b]Machick[/b] is a [i]Vampire Survivors[/i]-style bullet heaven with a twist: instead of each character having a different weapon, you craft custom wands that change projectile types, damage stats, attack speed, and different buffs. You play as a magic chicken, survive timed waves, collect experience, and look at the screen questioning your life by the time you take into account it's your 6th play and you're doing the same thing over and over.
[b]Pros:[/b]
- The wand crafting [i]concept[/i] is genuinely neat
- It's short enough that the 100% doesn't waste too much of your life
[b]Cons:[/b]
- Rerolls frequently give you the exact same thing you just discarded
- Everything is janky: animations, UI, and enemies all feel unfinished
- No kill tracker per weapon/passive
- Zero build variety; every run plays identically with the same items and upgrades
- Audio is broken: overlapping sound effects, broken volume sliders, and no meaningful music
- Nothing is explained: chest upgrades, chicken stats, special wand scaling, you have to guess everything
[u](More about the pros and cons in the in-depth review part below)[/u]
[h1]Should You Buy This Game?[/h1]
[b]No[/b]. Not even on a deep sale. [b]Machick[/b] isn't really bad, it's just meh. It has the ideas of a decent survivor clone but none of them actually work 100%. If you want a good survivor game with crafting, look elsewhere. The wand mechanic unfortunately doesn't carry this game alone. If you're here for easy achievements, then I guess you can buy it on sale since it doesn't really demand much of your brain.
[h1]In-Depth Review[/h1]
[h3]Visuals[/h3]
[b]Machick[/b] blends pixel art with VFX effects, and it's.... alright. It's not ugly but I feel it doesn't have personality. It tries to give the enemies some fun designs but they are not really well portrayed. No chest opening animation, no proper enemy death animation, no level up animation. It's just bland. The weapon VFX are fine but nothing that will really catch your attention or make you feel powerful by looking at it.
[h3]Soundtrack[/h3]
This is genuinely one of the worst audio experiences I've had in a survivor game. The sound effects are low-quality, the music is forgettable, and the mixing is broken: even if you drag the SFX slider to minimum, the spells and explosions still overpower the music. Worse, sounds stack on top of each other with no limit, creating a cacophony of chirps and blasts that makes the game actively unpleasant to listen to. I muted the entire game after my third run and never turned it back on.
[h3]The Game[/h3]
[b]Machick[/b] follows the standard survivor formula: pick a level, survive for 10-15 minutes, kill the final boss, collect your rewards. There are 5 levels, with the last one stretching for as long as you can last. After each run, you spend gold on wand upgrades and unlock new chickens, although the latter doesn't really add or change anything to your gameplay.
The wand crafting system should be the star. You pick a wand type that fires different projectiles, select different types of wood with different damage, attack speed, and buffs, slot in up to 5 elemental cores with different effects, and select different elemental runes to increase your power even further. Early on, it's really interesting to check all the different combinations. But here's the main problem: once you make one really strong wand, you never need to craft a new one again. The game doesn't incentivize variety. There are no enemy resistances, no level gimmicks that force you to adapt, no reason to ever touch the crafting bench after hour two. Which brings us to the [i][u]"Craft 20/50/100 Wands"[/u][/i] achievement. During a natural playthrough, you'll craft maybe 15 to 20 wands. To hit 100, you will see yourself making a bunch of random wands just to immediately dump them and keep the cycle going until the achievement pops. At least it doesn't take much; I believe it took me around 10-15 minutes.
The reroll system is completely useless. You already start with 10 rerolls for the weapons/passives and 10 rerolls for special items, which are counted separately. The game's purpose is to turn off your brain and just pick all the weapons. Is there even a need for rerolls? The developers also believe there's no need for it because you can reroll items up to 5 times in a row and get the same options on all these 5 times.
The UI is another low point. You can't quickly check your items and passives mid-run, you have to pause, navigate to another menu, go back manually (esc doesn't work for some reason) and then go back to your gameplay. This makes me wonder if they did any playtesting for this game or if the people that tested just didn't care enough to check... which is weird considering this is a survival game. There's no kill track per weapon so you can't actually see which one is stronger. Chest upgrades exist, but the game never explains what leveling them does or how long their respawn cooldown is. You're just leveling it up for the cheap dopamine.
[h1]Completionist Tips[/h1]
- Don't wait to craft 100 wands organically. Grind it as soon as you can by crafting the first wand, deleting it, and repeating.
- Prioritize buying the upgrade that lets you increase the amount of cores in your wand. At the beginning you can use only 1 so try to get to 5 asap. Then buy all the cores as well, especially the double XP core.
- Special wands are not worth using in my opinion. Get them just for the achievement.
- Mute the game. Your ears will thank you.
[h1]Conclusion[/h1]
[b]Machick[/b] wants to be an easy, creative survival game, but while trying to be like that it loses the main core of a survival game which is thinking about your build and seeing how you're going to play each level to survive and get stronger. With mechanics not well explained, and characters and weapons feeling all the same. It just doesn't feel rewarding enough to keep going. Quite the opposite actually, if not for the achievements I would've dropped this way sooner.
The genre lives and dies on "just one more run." [b]Machick[/b] kills that feeling after your first hour. I hope [b]Machick 2[/b] fixes what this game couldn't, because the idea deserves better.
