Stick It To The Stickman Review – Roguelite Stage Capitalism

I feel like I saw Stick it to the Stickman during its Early Access period, but for whatever reason, just forgot it existed. it was announced Luckily for me (and hopefully for you), it landed in my lap to review anyway, and I can say my life is objectively better with this game in it.

The short pitch for this is that it’s a very satirical and silly beat ’em up game where everything is a stickman rag-doll and you just hope for the best. The long version is that it has some deeply funny things to say about capitalism and business in general, while also being a mish-mash of so many little games inside of one incredible and very simple-looking shell.

You kick things off with the side-scrolling brawling with all its delightfully wobbly animations. You basically have to pick and upgrade moves to add to your combo, whether those are normal things like a kick or slap, or a little weirder like a paper airplane. As you upgrade those moves though, they can become things like Hadoukens or parcel bombs. You can even dragon kick your way around the fights.

You can fight enemies to the death just with your own abilities, but you also unlock new hazards to feature as well – an IT unlock meaning there’s a chance to electrocute enemies by knocking them into servers, for example. However, that’s only the first of many main modes of play. You end up doing platforming challenges to deliver packages, you can get into a fight club which is an auto-battler of sorts, and the 1.0 full game release has added a Survivors-like mode on top. There’s even a GTA-style wanted meter in the overworld.

There’s so much thrown into the mix, but it never feels overdone. A lot of the modes are less about depth and more about just having a damn good time. And you are going to have a damn good time, so who cares? There’s a constant slew of upgrades and unlocks, with more and more revealing themselves as you put more hours in.

This is a game with a solid message about capitalism, with a lot of genuinely funny jokes throughout, but any story here is just a vehicle to get you to a place where you can have a good time.

I play a lot of roguelites a lot of the time, as it’s my favourite flavour of game, but it’s rare that one just pushes logic to the side in favour of being a blast from start to finish. What’s really cool is that there is a story you can play through to defeat the ultimate big bad of capitalism, and you can absolutely stop playing there if you want to, but you can also dip into the various modes after that to keep enjoying the pure dopamine factory that is beating up red stick men.