Developer Free Lives is back with publisher Devolver Digital, bringing us another potential hit to their ever-growing library. Free Lives has brought us ‘Broforce’, ‘Genital Jousting’, ‘GORN’ and ‘GORN 2’, ‘Terra Nil’, ‘Cricket Through the Ages’, and my Indie pick of the year 2024, ‘Anger Foot’. Will ‘Stick it to the Stickman’ stick the landing, or be a sad doodle in the footnotes?

BUT FIRST! Let’s go back in time to a place where a young 22-year-old Ash was waiting for the release of Final Fantasy X, and had nothing but time to surf the internet and go to the movies. *Cues the Scooby Doo wobbly transition*. Those from 2001 would remember a time when the internet was a weird and wonderful place of innocence. Where content creators would have to send their works out into the world, hoping word of mouth would give them the traction to become popular.

This is where I discovered ‘Xiao Xiao 3’. Xiao Xiao 3 was a flash animation of a fight scene between stickmen. I was so enamoured then and still am today at how competent the cartography is, that compared to movie fight scenes today, Xiao Xiao 3 holds up better than most. I would be happy to go as far as saying this was John Wick before he was even a thought, well, John Wick as a stickman at least.

I’ve always wished Xiao Xiao 3 would become a game, and when Free Lives announced Stick it to the Stickman was coming, I was excited to get my hands on it and find out if my 24 years of anticipation would be met. *Cues the Scooby Doo wobbly transition*.

The plot of Stick it to the Stickman is simple. You are a lowly blue stickman employee of a corporation who “literally” needs to fight your way to the top through red stickman company loyalists. By fighting your way to the top, you dethrone the current CEO and are approached by the giant board members who offer you the CEO position. And of course, absolute power corrupts absolutely, as you turn from blue to red and become the corporation’s new dictator.

This is Stick it to the Stickman’s core gameplay loop. Start at the bottom, fight your way to the top, and take over. What this two-dimensional physics brawler does is introduce different employee types you can play as. There are 21 different employees, each with a unique mix of attack abilities and a passive ability.

To give an example of only two employees, you have The Temp, who attacks with a thrown coffee mug, spin kick, uppercut, and front kick and has a passive ability of multitasker, which improves his health with each attack. The second example is the Weeb, which comes with karate chop, throw knife, and karate chop and has a passive ability to run like a ninja, which does nothing but look cool.

Not all employees are available initially, as you will need to complete tasks to unlock them. The tasks vary from unlocking promotions, which is how you get new attacks to use when playing, to using certain attacks, to upgrading the Finance Tower, in which you are conducting your hostile takeover. There is a lot of replayability here, as the more you unlock, the more content you get to interact with in the Finance Tower, and the more employees you get to play as.

Difficulty is regulated by your base pay, where $6 is easy, $9 is medium, and $15 is hard. The money you earn is what you use to unlock the Finance Towers upgrades and purchase other establishments in which to interact with, like the Fulfilment Centre, Employee Evaluation Centre, and Cage Fight.

These upgrades are displayed as a skill tree in which, once a number of unlocks are purchased, the next tier will become available. These establishments also offer a different version of gameplay, where the Employee Evaluation Centre is a platforming brawler, and the Cage Fight is an automatic one-on-one bout.

The unlock system is my most disliked feature of the whole game. Gaining money is easy enough, but some unlocks require a specific currency like paperclips or sweat. The requested quantities for some of these unlocks are massive, and I had to grind for hours to

get enough to unlock certain features. It wouldn’t have been so bad if there were multiple ways to earn the currency, but unfortunately, to earn the vast quantities needed, playing the same way over and over made the game overstay its welcome.

Unfortunately, I know this all sounds very confusing, but Stick it to the Stickman slowly introduces these features gradually, so the learning curve is as simple as drawing a stickman.

Controlling your stickman can be done with keyboard and mouse or a controller. The controller felt more natural for the genre of the game. You can freely move your employee wherever you want, with button commands that are as simple as jump, attack, interact, and special.

What makes brawling so unique is that your attacks are done in sequential order, so by using The Temp as an example, when you press attack, you will throw a coffee mug first, press attack again, and you will then do a spin kick, press it again, you will do the uppercut, you get the idea. As you gain promotions, new attacks can be added to your attack order, or upgraded versions of your current attacks can be applied. This makes every run different, as you never know what will be made available.

Graphically, Stick it to the Stickman is bright and cartoony, giving the stickmen a three-dimensional depth through smart lighting and shading, and placing them on a drab background, allowing them to pop right off the screen. Animations are smooth and fluid, which are required for the fast-paced action Stick it to the Stickman offers.

The music pumps low and hard, giving that perfect gravitas to the action. The sound effects delivered by the attacks pop like the stickmen, where a kick and punch are as unique as the thump of a sledgehammer, to the rolling rat-a-tat-tat from the machine gun. The only misstep was in the delivery of the comedic elements through the voice acting. Though the voice acting was clear and concise, with a funny South Park-esque Canadian flip-top head way of speaking. The comedy becomes tiresome, as it reuses what feels like the same joke told in different ways.

So, has my anticipation been met? Yes, yes, it has. Although the lengthy grind and tiresome comedy didn’t appeal to me, as a whole, Stick it to the Stickman is great. With its fast-paced action, poppy graphics, thoughtful audio, and massive replayability, Stick it to the Stickman is another hit for developer Free Lives and publisher Devolver Digital.

Written by: Ashley Barnett-Cosgrove