Admit it: you can’t draw Mario. Not properly. You can’t draw Sonic either, and you definitely can’t draw Kratos, or Arthur Morgan out of Red Dead Redemption 2, or Aloy out of Horizon Zero Dawn.
But you can draw a stickman, the most accessible, universal, and democratic of all the videogame characters.
Developer Djinnworks has been making hay with the humble stickman for years, so far producing close to 40 games starring the iconic stickman figure, including Stickman Tennis, Stickman Hockey, and Stickman Soccer.
Stickman Ski is the latest arrival. The game sees you steering your stickman down a variety of wildly dangerous ski slopes littered with rocks, ramps, see-saws, and snow cannons, while avalanches regularly pursue you as you descend.
There are night courses, too, in case barrelling down a mountain on a couple of fibreglass planks isn’t dangerous enough in the daylight.
While the first couple of stages are fairly straightforward, it doesn’t take long for the game to become insanely challenging. You’ll faceplant into rocks, plough headlong into the ground, lose your footing and tumble over, and generally wipe out in every painful way imaginable.
But you can avert this fate by mastering the controls, which involve a blend of touching and tilting. To accelerate you hold a finger down on the right hand side of the screen, while you brake with the left. In addition you can pull off little jumps by swiping up.
Whenever you find yourself aloft, however, the controls switch to tilt, You have tip your phone left or right to adjust your position in the air, ensuring that you land squarely on the ground.
Stickman Ski’s stages are spread across four different mountains: the Alps, the Himalayas. Blackcomb, and finally the Carpathians. Naturally, they get more difficult as you go along, and you can only unlock stages and mountains by completing earlier stages and earning stars.
Or you can fork out to unlock them all at once. Either way, Stickman Ski is available to download for free on Google Play and the App Store right now.
Published: Jan 2, 2019 01:56 pm