Touhou Mechanical Scrollery
Critic Reviews for Touhou Mechanical Scrollery
Touhou Mechanical Scrollery is a mess of a game. It's obvious that there's high ambition and plenty of love for the source material, but the final product is riddled with poor controls, rough visuals, and forgettable combat mechanics that make it an absolute chore to get through.
I’ll be honest, this doesn’t feel like something that should have been released yet. It feels more like an early build of a game still in development. The visuals need some polish, combat needs larger hit detection for melee and dodging…it really needs a lot more love.
Overall, I have to say I had a surprising amount of fun with Touhou Mechanical Scrollery. The stages weren't too long, and the game finishes before it starts wearing on you too badly. Yes, it is rather short at only four chapters with about ten or so missions per chapter, but it was a nice pace. The graphics are decent, and the soundtrack quality isn't bad. You get enough material drops that you won't be farming a stage for six hours trying to get an azure dragonsphire equivalent, although the amount of money you'll need is a little aggravating. Weapon trees are pretty decent with a variety of options, and I didn't have the game crash while playing. That being said, it's very clunky and could use a lot of refining. As a step away from the standard 2D fare, I'd say it is a nice refreshing step. As a whole however, it falls flat in some key areas, although not to the point that it causes any critical issues.
While Touhou Mechanical Scrollery is certainly not a perfect game, it shows a lot of promise. The team has optimized the game somewhat, already fixing some of the controller issues and full screen framerate issues. There are still some occasional dips, but with my Ryzen 2600 and RTX 2060KO I didn’t have too much trouble running this all the way up to 1440p. If they get the code running a little better I could probably go up to 4K, but right now it dips just a little too much for my liking. These issues aside, the game looks amazing, and is actually really fun to play. Some may find it a bit repetitive, but I had a lot of fun gathering the materials and upgrading the various weapons. For its asking price of $19.99, if you’re a Touhou fan you should probably jump on this one. You get 8 hours or more of gameplay here, and while the game certainly has some issues, I still think good outweighs the bad. If the team here does further fixes down the line I will likely raise this score, and honestly seeing how far they’ve already come, I think they will.
