Where other video games I've played thus far here on Steam can sometimes have me ponder for a few hours whether it can be recommended, the deliberation for [i]Battle Simulator: Counter Stickman[/i] was prompt and needed no further action. No offense to the developer themselves, but this is a video game that comes across as what is now known as "AI slop." About ten years ago, before the prominence of AI and being able to blame it for all of our current problems, this would have just been considered a pointless game that you'd find on some website like Newgrounds that a kid created as practice for a future career in game design, but I don't really know anymore whether or not we can give that as an excuse as we give the developer a pat of the back for their efforts, as this seems effortless and one of those many games here on Steam that is just designed for profiting from the trading card system as it's an extra revenue stream in addition to any sales of the game itself.
The game also requires you consent to telemetry data, and we don't really know who is viewing that data or how secure their server is. Surely, if the game was truly spyware then Valve would have removed it from the store by now, but there have been instances of a video game flying underneath their radar and infecting personal computers or stealing data. I didn't notice anything on my machine but for a video game of this quality, it's a bit odd and if the developer wants to be taken seriously then they perhaps need to release a statement explaining why the player is asked to consent. Is it to do with the Unity engine, perhaps? Is it because this is obviously a mobile game first that was cheaply ported to Steam for extra cash potential and the developer never removed the prompt? We don't really know and people are going to read reviews like this one where their suspicions will be confirmed.
The game itself is just a "strategy game" (use that loosely) using the iconic stick figures (also of the Newgrounds era) that were once popular for technical reasoning since it solved a few problems for developers, like the anatomy hurdle. The assets are lightweight and fluid and so the animator can focus on funny physics and momentum that adds some humor to the game as the stick character ragdolls through the air until it collides with some surface. But there's nothing truly unique about the game and the "stick man" design philosophy is seemingly abandoned as it's generally seen as a low-effort choice and it isn't the early 2000s anymore where many people were still using slow dial-up internet. This is perhaps a game that could have been more popular in the late '90s to early 2000s as the vector line stickman would require virtually zero memory compared to pixel art characters or a heavy bitmap image, but modern gaming expects a bit more now even from indie developers.
Perhaps there isn't anything inherently wrong with relying on stick figures for your video games, as I'm sure there's still an audience for it, but if you resort to stick figures instead of detailed human characters, the other aspects of your video game must be exemplary. You want to go for something that players would say, "it's [i]XCOM[/i] but with stick figures." This is instead a barebones "strategy game" (again, use it loosely) that appears as another generic Unity asset flip where nothing about it seems unique to the developer in that they created it themselves. The music is generic and loud and cannot be turned down due to a lack of a settings menu, there's the overworld narrator that uses [i]Unreal Tournament[/i] elimination streaks like "dominating," etc. You just click on these nodes at the starting line to spawn your units and they'll run forward automatically while you hope that the badly coded AI wins in your favor. There's no input or controlling of these characters, you're basically just a spectator where watching turtles race to a finish line would be more entertaining. The first round I played had my stickmen throwing a grenade at a tall wall and the grenade bouncing backward towards it. But I digress, when a developer creates a video game that doesn't even have settings to it? It's not going to be a good game.
The entire map lacks any texturing and might as well have been molded from clay, except creating a van or taxi from clay would take infinitely more skill. You cannot discern the world around you and where you even are or why your stick figures are "striking at the terror" of the enemy stickmen. There's randomly placed vehicles and shapes that are meant to act as walls but it's just the button in Microsoft Paint that lets you instantly draw a rectangle. Are we infiltrating the compound of a terrorist unit? Are we inserting into a bank to eliminate robbers and free hostages? You can't really tell and it's ultimately just a bland side-scroller arena with very stiff animations of the stickmen that just make it look even sillier. Attempting to load into the map without selecting your stickmen also prompts you with a typographical error that should have been corrected by now: "you muse first add more stickmen" with a button that says "okey." That just adds to the overall unprofessional quality of the game that even indie developers must adhere to.
Mainly, the game comes across as positively reviewed here on Steam because most of the negative reviews (like this one) are coming from people who received the game for free because the developer set it as free for a limited time (like how I acquired it) or got a Steam key through some third-party website such as Humble Bundle or Fanatical, and Valve has ruled that video games obtained outside of Steam proper are not really counted towards the score of the game. But it's not a good game and won't be considered a good game until the developer takes the core foundation they have and improves upon it with actual logic sets, a properly designed AI, actual maps to play in that have texture and shading, etc.
This cannot be a game sold for any amount of money and should be set as a free to play video game.
