Stick It To The Stickman – Fire or be Fired!

Introduction

Stick It To The Stick Man is a 2D beat-em-up game with roguelike elements by Free Lives. Referred by an old friend of yours, you apply for work at a big firm and quickly get accepted. However, the company is very liberal about firing its stickman workers and beating them senselessly.

How do you get fired?

In just another day at the office, you’re fired the moment you leave your desk and immediately assaulted by hordes of stickmen ready to execute the firing process. Equipped with a small starter set of offensive moves and the ability to briefly enter slow motion, you must reach the top of the office building and fire Big Boss instead. But to get there, you have to punch and kick your way through several floors of different rank-and-file employees and their superiors!

As a roguelike experience, Stick It To The Stickman lets you select from a plethora of unlockable classes, each with unique moves and passive abilities. You can gain more moves or upgrades through gaining enough experience for a promotion. When you press the attack button, you execute the highlighted action at the bottom bar and cycle to the next, adding a unique and limited twist to brawler games.

The upgradable moves you can find are plentiful, including kicks, punches, rolls, melee weapons like axes and chainsaws, consumable ranged weapons like coffee mugs, and more. Some are average, others are pretty overwhelming or quickly run out, and some attacks are outright game-changing like levitating all employees (even the bosses) into the air. You will need the powerful abilities if you want any chance at meeting Big Boss.

Those stickmen look sticky

Stick It To The Stickman is a visual feast thanks to its lively, quirky, and over-the-top stickman physics and animation, combined with simple yet effective 3D graphics and high-end visual effects. The background music also pumps you up for all the intense employee-firing action you will undertake.

For what little narrative and story there is, the game uses it well in emphasizing the various horrors of the workplace. The measly minimum wage, how easy it is to get replaced, everyone out to get you for a promotion or a short cash boost, to overtime work, it’s all there. This makes it even more gratifying to punch the whole company into oblivion and try your luck at supplanting the CEO.

In Conclusion

Stick It To The Stickman is a surprisingly versatile roguelike game, with several classes, abilities, and moves, and lots of workers waiting to be laid off (if they don’t lay you off first). The game is also brief, with no run taking more than twenty minutes, allowing you to play a round or two during work breaks.

There’s plenty of other cool platformers you can check out!
Cuphead – GRIS – Double Cross – The Pedestrian

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