Info about Stickman Trenches:

Official game description:
Stickman Trenches is a challenging Real Time Strategy game in which you need to manage your men and weapons and build up your defenses in the brutal trenches of Stick World War 1. Balance focusing on attack and defense. Build up your army using numerous infantry types and powerful war machines like tanks, while also upgrading your trenchworks to better defend your men and protect your base. Remember soldier, if your base gets taken you lose. So charge across no-mans land and take the enemy's base first!
Game Content
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*   Take the fight to the enemy in Single Battle Mode and learn to fight in the trenches, then try to survive against countless enemy waves in Endless Survival  
*   Use powerful abilities like calling in precision mortars or devastate the enemy with artillery bombardment  
*   Upgrade your trenches defensive abilities to better survive incoming wave attacks and give your soldiers better cover  
*   Equip your soldiers with WW1 era weaponry ranging from rifles, trench sweeping shotguns, snipers, flamethrowers, fully automatic machine guns and more

Release date: 1 Mar, 2023

Categories: Real-time Strategy, Base Building, Resource Management, Unit Management, Single-player, Tower Defense, Strategic Combat, Map Editor


- Hardware Profile: No data
Feature extractions:
- Community Price: No data
- Playtime Metrics: No data
- Time-to-fun: No data
- Player Archetypes: No data


Below are summaries of things people say about the game per category.
Each point is assigned a weight that represents how often it is mentioned across all reviews.
What players like:
- Highly enjoyable and engaging (weight 0.86): 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 (weight 0.21): 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 (weight 0.11): 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 (weight 0.1): 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 (weight 0.09): 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.
- Charming stickman art style (weight 0.06): The stickman art style is a notable and liked feature, evoking nostalgia for many players. The focus on stickmen is seen as unique and contributes to the game's charm.
- Detailed unit graphics (weight 0.04): Players appreciate the attention to detail in the graphics of infantry and tanks, finding them well-designed. Experimenting with different unit types, including tanks, is also highlighted as a cool aspect.
- Enjoyable tech tree progression (weight 0.03): The tech trees are considered a fun and engaging aspect of the game, providing meaningful progression and strategic choices for players.
- Impactful sound design (weight 0.02): The sound design, particularly the impactful sound of bombs and their visual effect of leaving holes, adds a nice touch to the game's atmosphere.
- Consistent developer updates (weight 0.02): Players appreciate that the developers frequently update the game, indicating ongoing support and potential for future improvements.

Common complaints:
- Technical Issues & Bugs (weight 0.95): 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 (weight 0.84): 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 (weight 0.49): 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 (weight 0.16): 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 (weight 0.16): 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 Performance & Mechanics Flaws (weight 0.13): There are significant issues with unit performance and mechanics, including player units missing shots frequently, artillery being overly powerful against various unit types, and trenches failing to provide adequate protection. This leads to frustrating combat scenarios.
- Infrequent Updates & Incomplete (weight 0.11): Players are concerned about the lack of ongoing development, noting that the game has received very few updates since its release. This contributes to the feeling that the game is incomplete and has been abandoned by the developers.

Gameplay feedback:
- Unit variety and utility (weight 0.17): 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 (weight 0.16): 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 (weight 0.1): 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 (weight 0.09): 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 (weight 0.09): 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.
- Medal currency and progression (weight 0.07): Medals serve as a secondary currency, earned by leveling up, and are crucial for unlocking skills and powerful units. They can also be converted to stars, highlighting their importance in progression.
- Predictable AI behavior (weight 0.05): The AI exhibits predictable behaviors, often attacking when the player has fewer troops or reacting to specific troop movements. This predictability can be exploited by players, suggesting a need for more dynamic AI.
- Strategic balance required (weight 0.03): Effective strategy involves reinforcing defenses early and balancing offensive and defensive actions.
- Realistic stalemates (weight 0.02): The game sometimes achieves realistic stalemates, reflecting its World War 1 inspiration and 'tug of war' format.
- WW1 tug-of-war gameplay (weight 0.02): The game is a World War 1 inspired tug-of-war side-scroller, where players battle across trenches.
- Basic game loop (weight 0.02): Players start with points and can restart, indicating a basic game loop for re-engaging with levels.

Performance notes:
- Poor game performance and lag (weight 0.17): 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 (weight 0.06): 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 (weight 0.01): A specific bug was reported where the screen moves to the left without player input, indicating a potential control or camera issue.

Recommendations:
- Recommended for specific player types (weight 0.25): 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 (weight 0.21): 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 (weight 0.07): 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 (weight 0.06): 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 (weight 0.03): 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.

Other player notes:
- Expand content and add multiplayer (weight 0.31): 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 (weight 0.16): 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 (weight 0.11): 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 (weight 0.04): 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 (weight 0.04): 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.
- Balance German faction and add zombie mode (weight 0.03): Specific requests include buffing German technology and troops, and providing them with a more sophisticated tech tree, alongside a unique zombie mode concept.
- Similar to Stick War/Flash games (weight 0.03): Some players perceive the game as similar to existing 'Stick War' or flash games, suggesting a familiar gameplay style.
- Good for casual play (weight 0.03): The game is seen as a good casual option for various age groups and suitable for passing time during boredom or travel.
- Small development team (weight 0.03): Players acknowledge that the game might be a small 'fun-project' developed by a limited team, which could explain current content limitations.
- Inconsistent game session length (weight 0.03): Feedback on game session length is mixed, with some finding it short and others perceiving it as long, indicating varied player experiences.
- Forgiving of current limitations (weight 0.02): Some players are willing to overlook the current lack of content and detailed information on unit stats, indicating a positive disposition despite limitations.

Emotions:
- Satisfaction (weight 0.26): Players feel satisfied due to the game's overall quality, engaging and challenging gameplay, and good value for money. Specific elements like historical accuracy, art style, and performance on various hardware also contribute to this positive experience.
- Frustration (weight 0.2): Frustration primarily stems from unbalanced difficulty, unfair AI behavior, and technical issues such as lag, crashes, and poor performance. Players also express frustration with specific overpowered factions or units, and a lack of effective learning resources.
- Disappointment (weight 0.17): Disappointment arises from the game's repetitiveness, perceived lack of content, and unfulfilled potential. Players are also let down by historical inaccuracies, technical issues preventing proper play, and a feeling that the game does not live up to expectations or its price point.
- Enjoyment (weight 0.06): Enjoyment is driven by the game's fun, simple, and addictive gameplay, often highlighted by strategic depth and unique mechanics. The overall positive experience and suitability as a time-killer also contribute to this emotion.
- Desire (weight 0.06): Players express a strong desire for new features, particularly multiplayer modes, more nations, and a campaign mode. There is also a wish for more sandbox content, mod support, and general balance improvements.
- Excitement (weight 0.05): Excitement is generated by the game's overall quality, engaging and addictive gameplay, and its potential for future content and updates. Players are thrilled by intense difficulty and unique strategic experiences.
- Boredom (weight 0.04): Boredom is caused by the game becoming tedious and repetitive quickly, often due to a lack of content, challenge, or long-term engagement. The gameplay loop can feel uninteresting after initial play.
- Joy (weight 0.03): Joy is experienced through fun and engaging gameplay, particularly in endless mode, and the overall high quality of the game. Specific elements like new factions or leading infantry to victory also bring joy.
- Hope (weight 0.03): Hope is tied to the game's potential for future improvements, updates, and the addition of highly desired features like multiplayer and campaign modes. Players are optimistic about the game's development.
- Anticipation (weight 0.01): Anticipation is driven by the desire for more content and future updates, with players looking forward to new factions, campaigns, and other game modes. Realistic stalemates in matches also build anticipation.
- Anger (weight 0.01): Anger is expressed due to perceived developer negligence, indifference, and the game being in an unplayable state. Unfair gameplay mechanics also contribute to this emotion.
- Confusion (weight 0.01): Confusion arises from difficulty spikes, unclear difficulty scaling, and a lack of understanding of game mechanics. The removal of a campaign mode also caused confusion among players.
- Love (weight 0.01): Love for the game is based on its overall quality and features, indicating a strong positive sentiment towards the game.
- Nostalgia (weight 0.01): Nostalgia is triggered when the game reminds players of childhood experiences, old flash games, or past mobile games, evoking a sense of familiarity and fondness.
- Optimism (weight 0.01): Optimism stems from the belief that the game has significant potential for improvement and can become one of the best in its genre, with fixable issues.
- Amusement (weight 0.01): Amusement is derived from the game's dark humor, satirical tone, and the perceived strength of certain factions like Russia, providing a lighthearted aspect to the experience.
- Appreciation (weight 0): Appreciation is shown towards the developers for their success in creating the game.
- Relaxation (weight 0): The game's suitability for unwinding and its generally relaxing nature contribute to a sense of relaxation for players.
- Contentment (weight 0): Contentment is felt due to the game's affordability and its suitability for casual play, offering a satisfying experience without high demands.
- Helpfulness (weight 0): Helpfulness is demonstrated by players providing gameplay tips and strategies to assist others.}