Stickman Trenches Review Summary

Highly enjoyable and engaging: Players generally find the game highly enjoyable, engaging, and addictive, offering good value for its price. It's seen as a fun, relaxing, and challenging strategy game with high replayability, making it a great time-killer.

Effective WW1 trench warfare: The game is praised for its effective portrayal of World War I trench warfare, offering a unique and engaging experience. Its cartoony art style is appreciated for making the historical setting accessible and fun, reminiscent of classic flash games.

Diverse and unique factions: The game's diverse factions, each with unique units, abilities, and historical specialties (like Russia's wave strategies), are highly appreciated. This variety ensures different gameplay experiences and adds to the strategic depth.

Excellent map editor feature: The inclusion of a map editor is a significant positive, allowing players to create and share their own maps. This feature enhances replayability and provides a creative outlet, with some finding it nearly perfect.

Deep strategic gameplay: The game offers deep strategic elements, allowing players to command various units, upgrade positions, and develop unique strategies. The ability to use tanks and mass infantry for storming trenches adds to the tactical depth.

Technical Issues & Bugs: The game suffers from numerous technical issues, including frequent crashes, significant lag, and various bugs. These problems severely impact gameplay, making the experience frustrating and, at times, unplayable.

Lacks Content & Replayability: Players report that the game quickly becomes boring and repetitive due to a lack of content, limited game modes, and shallow gameplay mechanics. Many feel it offers little replayability and is not worth its price, resembling a simple flash game.

Unbalanced Difficulty & AI Cheats: The game's difficulty scaling is severely unbalanced, with AI often cheating by having superior income, unit production, and accuracy. This leads to unfair and frustrating experiences, as the AI does not follow the same rules as the player, making higher difficulties feel impossible and easy mode too simple.

Endless Mode Imbalance: Endless mode is criticized for being either too easy or too difficult, with inconsistent enemy spawns and AI behavior. Players report issues like early tank appearances, game-freezing lag, and glitches that make the mode unengaging or unplayable.

Unit & Ability Imbalance: Specific units and abilities are perceived as unbalanced; grenades and artillery are often too powerful, while tanks are considered useless. This creates a meta where certain units are overwhelmingly effective, diminishing strategic depth.

Unit variety and utility: The game features various unit types, including infantry, tanks, and artillery, with a core gameplay loop of recruiting and deploying units to destroy the enemy base. However, there's a perception that many units lack distinct utility, with spamming cheap infantry often being the most effective strategy, and a desire for more unit variety and control.

Endless mode is engaging: Endless mode is a key feature, offering extended gameplay and being perceived as more entertaining than other modes. However, it lacks progression and can be exploited, suggesting a need for balance improvements like enemy bombardments.

Campaign length and grind: The single-player campaign is relatively short, completable in about 3 hours on normal difficulty, with 12 maps across various difficulty levels. While there are a decent number of maps, the game can feel grindy, especially if players don't adopt aggressive strategies.

Upgrade system needs expansion: Upgrading is a core mechanic, allowing players to improve trenches and their base for better defense. There's a desire for more diverse upgrade options to enhance strategic depth.

Future development potential: The game has significant potential for future development, with suggestions for new mechanics like fortifications (barbed wire, landmines), additional factions (France, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Turks, Commonwealth), more unit types, and long-term progression systems, including multiplayer and leaderboards.

Poor game performance and lag: Many players report significant performance issues, including low frame rates, frequent lag, and crashes, especially during combat or in specific game modes like 'endless battle'. This occurs even on high-end systems, suggesting poor optimization.

Mixed performance and small size: Some players contradict the performance issues, stating the game runs well even on lower-end hardware and has decent graphics for its small file size. This indicates a mixed experience regarding optimization.

Unintended screen movement: A specific bug was reported where the screen moves to the left without player input, indicating a potential control or camera issue.

Recommended for specific player types: Many players recommend the game, especially to fans of WW1, trench warfare, 2D games, or specific content creators. Some also suggest it for those who enjoy strategic games or large armies (Russian faction).

Price point concerns: A significant number of reviews indicate that the game's current price point is too high. Players suggest purchasing it only when it's on sale, ideally at a deep discount, or if they have extra funds.

Generally positive reception: Some players express strong positive sentiment, rating the game highly (e.g., 10/10, 8/10, 7/10). They consider it a great game overall.

Better alternatives exist: Several players do not recommend the game, suggesting there are better alternatives available or that it's not worth the effort. Some specifically point to 'Warfare 1917' or 'Mage & Monsters' as superior options.

Research and wait advised: Players advise potential buyers to watch YouTube videos for gameplay insights before purchasing. They also suggest waiting for future updates and sales before committing to a purchase.

Expand content and add multiplayer: Players frequently request the addition of multiplayer modes, including PvP and co-op with friends, to enhance replayability. There's also a strong desire for more diverse content, such as new factions, larger maps, and additional game modes like campaigns and zombie defense.

Introduce new units and controls: Players are keen on new unit types, including engineers for fortifications and medics for healing. They also desire more control over unit deployment and specific actions, such as choosing which units to send out of trenches or placing mines.

Implement air support features: There's a clear interest in integrating air support, such as planes and zeppelins, for scouting, bombing, or other tactical advantages. Specific historical German planes are also suggested.

Expand tech and battle environments: Players suggest expanding the game's scope to include naval elements, more complex tech trees, and diverse battle environments like mountains and seas.

Improve medal acquisition: Players desire more accessible ways to earn in-game medals, such as converting stars or receiving them periodically, and suggest a credits feature for community contributions.