Stick It to the Stickman 1.0 Is Here, and Apparently the CEO Is Also a Carjacker
Stick It to the Stickman has launched into 1.0 today, September 23, and what looked like a physics brawler about kicking your boss through office furniture turns out to have a surprisingly real playable-villain streak.
You murder your way through promotions, eventually become CEO, steal cars, get chased by police, suppress protesters and kidnap building inspectors.
Which feels less like climbing the corporate ladder and more like someone discovered LinkedIn after three days without sleep.
The important part is that the joke isn't only happening in the dialogue. The game actually lets you do this stuff.
If becoming CEO through assault feels too restrained, Nighthawks lets you become a vampire and potentially eat the people who trusted you. Corporate ethics suddenly look magnificent.
Apparently murder is a recognised path to middle management
The basic idea remains beautifully stupid.
Pick a worker archetype, enter an office full of people who also appear to want a career, and start beating your way upwards. You gain XP, pick new attacks, upgrade existing ones and build increasingly ridiculous combinations while climbing through the company.
Eventually you become CEO.
I like this because it cuts through an enormous amount of corporate bullshit.
No performance review. No development plan. No six-month leadership trajectory where Gary says he “really sees potential in you” before promoting someone called Thomas because Thomas once played padel with the regional director.
Kick Gary through a photocopier.
Promotion secured.
But reaching the top doesn't end the idea. It actually makes it stranger, because once you're running the company, the game starts letting you behave like the kind of CEO normally mentioned in a seven-part investigative podcast.
You expand the business, acquire subsidiaries and get involved in activities that include stealing cars, suppressing protesters and kidnapping building inspectors.
The building inspector gets me.
Diamonds? Sure.
A rival executive? Fine.
Sensitive corporate documents? Makes sense.
But apparently somewhere in this company's expansion plan there is a man called Derek standing beside a fire exit with a clipboard, and the board has decided Derek knows too much.
Get him in the van.
Then you discover there's basically a tiny GTA hiding inside it
This is where Stick It to the Stickman becomes much more interesting for CRIMENET than I expected.
There is a city layer where you can carjack vehicles, acquire guns, attack people and draw police attention. Keep going and the wanted response escalates until tanks become involved.
Tanks.
You started this game trying to get promoted and somehow ended up requiring an armoured military response.
That escalation is important, because now we're beyond the game simply calling you a horrible capitalist while you perform normal action-game duties. You can actually behave like a criminal and the game has systems responding to it.
A parked car stops being scenery and becomes somebody else's transport that you can immediately solve the ownership problem of.
The police aren't just little blue men wandering around to make the city look busy. Your behaviour creates heat.
And once company expansion starts involving kidnapping and protest suppression as well, the whole CEO fantasy begins to look less like satire sitting on top of the mechanics and more like satire that has escaped into them.
I wouldn't call this a crime simulator. That's going too far.
You aren't casing warehouses, laundering money or spending Thursday afternoon looking for a buyer willing to take fourteen stolen Dell monitors without asking why half of them still have OFFICE 3B written on the back.
The main game is still fighting.
But you genuinely get to be the bastard.
That's the bit I care about.
Prefer your criminal career with fewer quarterly meetings and considerably more getaway vehicles? Head into CRIMENET’s Best Heist Games and find somewhere more traditional to ruin everyone’s afternoon.
1.0 appears to have looked at the existing insanity and decided it needed more departments
Today's 1.0 release adds Billionaire Bunker and Neurolink, plus more characters, bosses and level content.
Billionaire Bunker flips the usual upward climb and sends you down through a bunker towards a final confrontation. Neurolink brings nine archetypes together with mind powers.
And by this point Stick It to the Stickman has accumulated so many different ideas that describing it as “the office fighting game” feels a bit like describing GTA as the game where you steal a car at the beginning.
There's the original corporate tower fighting. The city. Wanted levels. Company expansion. Delivery challenges. Auto-battler elements. Now a billionaire bunker and mind powers.
The developers appear to have treated genres the same way the player treats unattended vehicles.
See one.
Take it.
See what happens.
And somehow that seems to be part of the appeal rather than the game collapsing under the weight of its own stolen furniture.
The game has already proved people like it. 1.0 still has to prove itself
This isn't one of those launches where we're standing around three Steam reviews trying to work out whether “BEST GAME EVER!!!!” was written by the developer's cousin.
Going into 1.0, Stick It to the Stickman already has more than 4,700 English-language Steam reviews and sits at roughly 96% positive.
That is a serious amount of Early Access evidence.
The combat-building, humour and sheer amount of variety have also been praised in professional coverage, so we know considerably more about the foundation than we usually do when a game walks out of Early Access wearing a new tie and announces that everything is finished now.
What we don't know yet is how the complete 1.0 build holds up.
There have been reports during Early Access of crashes, softlocks, progression issues and performance trouble in some modes. Free Lives has patched and worked on optimisation throughout development, but launch day is not enough time to declare all of that dead and buried.
The new modes also haven't had enough time in the wild for anyone sensible to start talking about longevity.
So I'm not pretending this is a review.
Give the game a few days. Let thousands of people attack it from angles no QA department could possibly have imagined. Somebody will eventually discover that equipping a stapler while reversing a stolen hatchback into a shareholder causes Belgium to disappear.
Then we'll know more.
Stickmen, carjackers, gangsters, smugglers, murderers and people whose business plan should really have been intercepted by police. CRIMENET’s Best Crime Games is where the rest of them are hiding.
The playable-villain part is what surprised me
I expected Stick It to the Stickman to qualify in the most technical sense possible.
You kill people. You're awful. Haha, evil employee.
Fine.
But the game keeps pushing the idea farther than that.
You murder for advancement. You become the person in charge. You steal cars. Police escalation follows your crimes. Corporate expansion involves activities that would normally require several lawyers, a crisis-management firm and somebody repeatedly saying “allegedly” on television.
The game keeps giving the bad behaviour actual mechanics.
That makes it much more interesting than another title where you're supposedly an outlaw but spend seventy percent of the campaign rescuing farmers and collecting medicine for orphans.
Stick It to the Stickman seems perfectly comfortable letting you become worse as your career improves.
Which, now that I think about it, may be the most realistic corporate progression system ever put into a videogame.
Stick It to the Stickman FAQ
Is Stick It to the Stickman fully released?
Yes. Stick It to the Stickman left Early Access and launched into 1.0 on September 23, 2026.
What kind of game is Stick It to the Stickman?
It is a physics-heavy roguelite brawler where you fight through corporate environments, build increasingly ridiculous attack combinations, climb the company hierarchy and eventually become CEO.
Can you actually play as a villain?
Yes. The villain fantasy goes beyond dialogue. You can murder your way through promotions, steal cars, attract police attention and take part in corporate activities including protest suppression and kidnapping building inspectors.
Is Stick It to the Stickman a crime game?
Partly. Crime is not the entire game, because combat remains the main focus, but carjacking, wanted levels and other criminal activities are genuine gameplay systems rather than background flavour.
What did Stick It to the Stickman 1.0 add?
The 1.0 release adds major new content including Billionaire Bunker and Neurolink, alongside additional characters, bosses and level content.
Comments