Stickboy War review

What it is

Stickboy War belongs to a lineage of two-dimensional siege games where two bases face each other across a flat battlefield and the winner is whoever breaks the other's gate first. You command stick-figure warriors against an army the developer calls the Imperial Berserkers, and the campaign takes you across an island, capturing castles level by level. The roster the developer lists runs to four kinds: miners who dig the gold, shield-bearers who soak damage, archers, and a bomb-carrying unit. The campaign is ten-plus levels long, the later ones adding fresh unit types and enemy reinforcements, with an upgrade tree and reward chests in between.

The tag list calls it tower defence, but that is only half right. You do defend a camp, but the win condition is offensive: you must destroy the enemy gate. That makes it closer to a lane-battle game than a turret game, and the interesting decisions are about when to stop building and start pushing.

How it plays

Everything is a click or a tap. You hire a unit by tapping its button, place it, and keep spending from the shop and upgrade panels as gold comes in, opening stronger warriors as the level goes on. Dragging positions your army as a group, which is how you advance, hold or retreat. There is no unit-by-unit micro, which suits a browser game; the skill is in the order and timing of purchases, not in clicking fast.

The economy is the game. Gold comes from miners, miners cost gold, and the first minute of every level is a compounding problem: each miner you buy early pays for itself many times over, but every second you spend on miners is a second the enemy spends on soldiers. The correct opening in almost every game of this type is to go heavier on economy than feels safe, then buy a shielder the moment the first enemy appears, and I would expect that to hold here.

Tips that actually help

Siege games of this kind are decided in the opening and lost in the middle. A few habits carry across every level.

• Buy miners first, then a shielder, then more miners. Economy compounds; soldiers do not.
• Shielders exist to stand in front of archers. Never send archers forward without one or the enemy melee will walk straight through them.
• Explosive units are for gates and clusters, not for single soldiers. Hold them until the enemy line is bunched or you are at the gate.
• Use the drag command to pull your whole army back to camp when a wave is coming, then re-advance behind it. Fighting under your own defences is cheaper than fighting in the open.
• Spend upgrade money on whatever unit you build most, not on unlocking the next one. A well-upgraded archer line beats a new unit you cannot afford to field.
• When a level introduces a new enemy unit, spend the first wave watching what it targets before you commit gold to a counter.

The campaign

Ten-plus levels across an island, each adding a unit, a tactic or a reinforcement, is a sensible structure for a browser strategy game, and the chests between levels give the upgrade economy somewhere to go. The risk with this design, speaking as someone who has balanced these curves, is that the developer's stated feature of powerful abilities that turn the tide tends to make later levels about spending rather than deciding. Whether the abilities here are a tool or a crutch is something I would want to see. The description does not say how progress between levels is stored, so assume it is local to this browser.

Where it falls short

No pause is stated, and a siege game where the enemy keeps building while you read a tooltip punishes anyone who plays in a busy tab. The stick-figure presentation is a genre convention rather than a choice, and it makes telling shielders from archers at a glance harder than it should be until you have learned the silhouettes. Ten-plus levels is a real campaign, but the description gives no sense of how long each one runs, and lane-battle levels can drag when both sides reach a stalemate of upgraded units.

Questions people ask

How do I win a level?

Destroy the enemy gate. Defending your own camp keeps you alive, but the level only ends when you push through and break their gate.

Which unit should I buy first?

Miners. They generate the gold that pays for everything else, and early miners compound. Buy a shielder as soon as the first enemy shows up, then return to economy.

Does it work on a phone?

Yes. Every action is a tap or a drag, and the on-screen buttons for hiring and upgrading are designed for touch.

How many levels are there?

The developer states ten or more campaign levels, each adding new units, tactics or reinforcements, with chests between them.