A 2D, two-button rhythm game, this game is long on style and on simplicity. Long ago, someone made a series of gifs depicting a stick-man having epic kung-fu fights with other stick men, and the people who made this game remembered those and put you in control of the stick man. While the fights aren’t quite as epic as the originals, being strictly on-the-ground affairs, the fighting stillA 2D, two-button rhythm game, this game is long on style and on simplicity. Long ago, someone made a series of gifs depicting a stick-man having epic kung-fu fights with other stick men, and the people who made this game remembered those and put you in control of the stick man. While the fights aren’t quite as epic as the originals, being strictly on-the-ground affairs, the fighting still looks quite impressive as you beat your way through hordes and hordes of enemy stickmen, smashing the scenery and visiting gruesome death upon your foes in a very visually satisfying manner.
The central conceit of the game is very simple – your stick-man is in the center of the screen. If you press the left mouse button, you attack left; if you press the right mouse button, you attack right. You have a limited attack range, and enemies come at you from both sides at erratic intervals. If you attack to a side and don’t connect with anyone, you’ll miss your attack. If you fail to attack someone before they reach you, they’ll attack you. If you run out of health, you die. There are no other controls in-game.
The game adds in some complexities on top of this – there are various colored stick figures which require a series of attacks to defeat as they battle you, with one variety requiring a very long series of clicks as you fight them in a temporarily isolated one-on-one duel, the other kind fighting like regular stick figures which dodge or block your attacks until you finally defeat them. There are also various weapons carried by enemies, some of which extend your attack range, others of which are projectiles which will one-hit kill all enemy types. The range-extending weapons can be picked up and thrown if you’re already carrying such a weapon, which causes them to ricochet around the screen, wreaking havoc. And some enemies will throw weapons at you in lieu of attacking themselves.
On top of this, there are various skills you can persistently equip to make the various weapons last longer without breaking, to throw the range-extending weapons more often, or to add special effects which heal you, give you temporary invincibility, slow down the enemies, kill large numbers of enemies at once, or otherwise do something fancy after a certain number of successful kills. These skills are themselves unlocked by defeating especially difficult levels.
There are also special levels which alter the game mechanics – hiding the colors of the multi-attack enemies, speeding up enemies, requiring you to kill a certain number of enemies within a certain time limit, requiring you to defend yourself perfectly from a barrage of projectiles, or killing a horde of enemies with ranged attacks without getting hit once. One of these even takes advantage of the fact that you smash the background scenery sometimes while attacking. There are even a few levels where you wield a lightsaber or pair of nunchakus and cut down hordes of quickly on-rushing enemies, while shown in silhouette with your weapon glowing.
All of this serves to mix up the game’s core gameplay a bit, and it serves is function well enough. Still, after playing this for a while you’re likely to get bored with it – it does a surprising amount with two buttons, but the gameplay is still dead simple. However, the upside is that all of the levels are very short, and it is easy to play the game in short little bursts between other things. In that way, it never gets old and continues to feel fresh for a long time, though even then, you’ll probably be about done with it by the time you beat the game after 10-15 hours of sporadic effort.
All in all, the game is flashy and surprisingly fun in short bursts, but it isn’t the sort of thing you want to sit and play for hours on end. This isn’t some amazingly complicated game, but it is a very decent example of just what can be done with only two buttons.… Expand
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