An old favorite recently rediscovered, Stick Smasher is an action game about survival. Can you withstand five levels of knife-wielding red stick men?
Basic Gameplay
Simple mechanics: destroy bad guys, get a few life points, survive a few seconds, rinse, repeat. 🙂 Each level lasts 50 seconds–can you survive that long?
Controls
- Press A to smash the knife-wielding bad guys when they get close enough
- Hit Spacebar to jump (you can also hold Spacebar to jump continually)
- Press D when you’ve got a glowy bomb to nuke the whole screen full of baddies
- Use Left and Right Arrow keys to move around
Items In-Game
 Regular Bomb |
These bombs roll from right to left across the screen, beginning about 30 seconds after gameplay starts on the first level. When you touch them, these bombs explode, hurting you slightly but also blowing up any enemies next to you. This is the preferred way to get rid of small groups of enemies at once. |
 Glowy Bomb |
These bombs fall from the top of the screen occasionally–you must touch them to “catch” them. Once you have them, you can hit D at any time (even while in the air) to destroy all the baddies on your screen at once. As far as I can tell, this bomb does not hurt you to set it off. |
 Life Point Heart |
These hearts fall from the top of the screen every so often, and like the glowy bombs, you must touch them to collect them. They give you about 10 Life Points back, which can mean all the difference if you’ve been knifed or bombed a few times. |
Best Strategies
This screencap from one of my playthroughs is the single best strategy for surviving the game: keep jumping around. (See yellow arrow.) Staying aerial means that the baddies can’t knife you unless you land for too long, but since you can hold the Spacebar to jump continuously, there’s no reason to stay on the ground much at all. I pretty much never use the A key to smash the baddies; using A means you’re locked in place on the ground, which means your health bar is far more endangered.
I usually like to jump all around the screen, keeping the baddies running back and forth. However, you can jump around close to the right side of the screen if you want to camp out and wait for bombs to come rolling through. This way, you can jump on a bomb and wave bye-bye to 5-10 baddies at a time! (However, I have noticed something strange about the rolling bombs: sometimes you land on them and set them off, but they don’t destroy any baddies nearby. Not sure what causes this to happen.)
Besides keeping an eye out for rolling bombs, grab the falling pink hearts and glowy bombs whenever you can. If you have to make a choice between getting a bomb or a heart, go with the bomb; you can set it off across the whole screen, and get a ton more life points that way. (Remember that getting rid of bad guys gives you a few life points apiece! :D)
The End Result
At the end of the fifth level, this screen will appear, with your final life score at bottom right and your game score at top left. For this runthrough, I got a pretty high score–close to 1200. The life score was about the highest I’ve ever gotten it, too. :O
Once you’ve managed to survive through the fifth level, Stick Smasher becomes more about perfecting your skill at avoiding the knives, using rolling bombs effectively and carefully, and getting both your life score and game score as high as possible. See if you can match or beat my score! 🙂
Play Stick Smasher: Stick Smasher @ MaxGames.com