8.1 hours played
Written 27 days ago
A multiplayer brawler featuring frantic fights with a range of wacky weapons.
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Stick Fight: The Game is exactly what the title implies - a game about stickmen fighting each other. Up to 4 players are dropped into an arena, with each of them trying to be the last man standing in order to win. To achieve this, your only abilities beyond basic movement is a bunch as well as a timed block to protect yourself. Beyond these basics, there are also weapons, which are dropped into the arena as time goes on and vastly enhance the power of whoever manages to pick them up.
All gameplay is physics-based, with your characters reacting a bit sluggishly to your inputs and their movements varying depending on the way their flailing limbs are positioned. Being hit will usually knock you around, as will the simple act of shooting your gun, making everything just a bit unpredictable. That being said, I found the movement to feel surprisingly nice and liked the challenge of reacting to and mastering the physics interactions.
Each round concludes fairly quickly, rarely lasting more than a minute, with the game immediately resetting to a different map as soon as only one player remains. This happens on a loop for however long you want - with no clear goal beyond having fn. In fact, score tracking is completely optional and disabled by default, encouraging you to mess around without worrying about consequences.
What keeps this basic concept from going stale after a few rounds is the variety of weapons the game throws at you. Beyond basic pistols, rifles, shotguns, melee weapons and explosive launchers, Stick Fight also features a large variety of more wacky and one-of-a-kind weaponry, allowing you to shoot snakes, stick opponents to surfaces, shoot through walls or spawn black holes. These often force you to adjust your playstyle to make proper use of or avoid their attacks and often end up creating hilarious situations, with people struggling to handle their guns and wildly flailing around the level to dodge attacks.
The rather small maps are similarly varied, featuring a host of different themes and gameplay systems. Beyond basic layout changes, many of them include various physics-based obstacles, pre-placed weapons, moving platforms and destructible environments amongst other gimmicks which help to keep the gameplay feeling fresh. There is also Steam workshop integration, allowing you to expand the map-pool even further, albeit with some restraints being placed on the levels' contents.
As for a more negative point, I felt the game as a whole to be rather unbalanced. Some weapons are simply better than others, and the positioning of players at the start of a round hugely influences which, if any, weapons they will get. Some maps simply favour certain players with the way they are set up and a single random weapon spawn will often lead to whoever picks it up first being able to dispose of all others before they get a proper way to fight back. That being said, given the quick rounds and the lack of focus on competitive play, I rarely perceived this to be a huge issue.
There's also a noticeable lack of status feedback on your characters, most obviously in the fact that there's no visualization of your remaining health, leaving you completely in the dark on how much damage you can still take or have to deal in a confrontation. This becomes an even bigger problem, as alive and dead players can't really be differentiated, meaning that people may lay down in order to trick you into thinking they're dead, which can lead to funny situations, but can also be rather annoying at times. Weapons also feature no display of their remaining ammo, with your character simply dropping their weapon once its empty. This leads to situations where you unexpectedly run out of shots and suddenly have to scramble without prior notice.
Beyond these readability issues, Stick Fight's presentation is excellent, with bright and distinct colours and very clean and fittingly simplistic artwork. This is supported by some flashy visual effects, which do a great job at making actions feel impactful, which can also be said about the game's sound effects. The soundtrack is similarly great, featuring catchy tracks that do a good job of getting you pumped up.
There are also some notable bugs I have to mention. For one, whenever a workshop map is first played, there's a high chance that some of the non-host players won't properly load in, leading to them being unable to move, which may or may not resolve after a while. Similarly, pre-placed weapons on workshop maps can often just not be picked up by the other players. As for the physics system, a player may at times be thrown off the stage immediately after switching maps or be lodged into the level geometry, causing them to become stuck and often impossible to kill. The latter issue is extra troubling, as there isn't a way to be unstuck or give up, meaning all other players will have to kill themselves in order for the game to progress.
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I found Stick Fight to be quite a fun game and had many great play sessions with my friends. While there are some issues and some noticeable potential for the game's concept to be explored further, I can only recommend you give it a shot, preferably with a group of friends.
