Stikbold! A Dodgeball Adventure brings a fun and quirky dodgeball game for both friends and family, but as a single player game, it’s mostly a drag due to long and arduous matches against the computer. On the other hand, it’s engaging with others as it provides a frenetic multiplayer experience.
Utilizing a unique art style, Stikbold brings a wacky side to the sport of dodgeball in its story mode, locations, and characters. The story mode is similar to the LEGO games. As you proceed from stage to stage, cutscenes with ridiculous happenings occur in the game. They’re not laugh out loud funny, but they can bring a smile to your face. The story is just there to take you from stage to stage though, and the narrative gets extremely wacky to the point of involving hippies and the devil. It’s nice to have though, as it only has 1-2 hours of playtime and multiple challenges. The boss battles, in addition, are well crafted and manage to change up the formula in an interesting way. The general gameplay, however, becomes derivative quickly.
The game is simple: you can throw the ball straight or at a curve, dodge, run, and push enemies to steal or knock them off the stage. Simplicity is what is key in most multiplayer experiences as more people can approach the game, but the game fails to maintain the fun factor that is needed for hours of play rather than minutes. The biggest issue is the repetitive nature of the game. You see, it is extremely easy to dodge the ball in the majority of the main campaign because of the game’s speed. At the later parts of the game, it’s easy for opponents to hit you but hard for you to hit them. During the main campaign, it took a long time to take out each person of the opposing team and what makes it worse is that there are three rounds you have to win. The game manages to change up the formula with alternating arenas that have hazards like Super Smash Bros (which is a big plus), but the difficulty was too low for most of the campaign.
This will be different, however, when playing with others on a couch especially when playing free-for-all. It’s fast paced, you always have to keep your eye on what’s happening around you, and the five stages available give enough variety for a few play sessions. The game is great, but the gameplay didn’t stick with me as much as other competitive games. This is because it’s easy to learn and also easy to master. Once you learn it, there’s no sense of progression. The game mechanics are fun, the controls are solid, and the stage hazards are cool ideas, but it lacks that “hard to master” edge that other competitive games like Rocket League or Super Smash Bros have had in the past.
What this game is great for is its personality. Set in the 1970’s, this game has bright colors, a polygon-esque art style, and boisterous characters to play as. From the psychedelic menus to the interesting stage designs, the game screams eccentricity. Just like the story mode, you get the character of the world they are trying to portray. The soundtrack fits the personality the developers are emoting with a bouncy theme song and fast music to match the action on screen. In addition, the sound work is effective as you hear the swerve of the dodgeball soaring through the sky and the thud of the ball hitting something/someone. The sounds for each stage are spot on as well. The voice work during the story mode and victory screens, however, gets grating quickly as the voices are loud and obnoxious.
Overall, Stikbold is fun to play with friends and family with its easy to learn controls and fast paced nature, but the game becomes a slog when playing by yourself during the story mode. The boss battles are a highlight of the story mode, but other than that, it’s a chore to go through. If you enjoy dodgeball or want a good game to play with others, check this out though. It could throw a curveball at your regular game nights.
A PS4 code of Stikbold! A Dodgeball Adventure was provided by Curve Digital for the purpose of this review.