Beat Stickman: Beyond

Somewhere in a fictional multiverse-spanning network, there is an employee whose entire job is beating up Stickmen, and a friendly supervisor named Nebody assigned to watch them do it. That is the setup of Beat Stickman: Beyond, Mini Fun Games' 2022 clicker that wraps the oldest stress-relief genre on the internet (the wack-the-thing game) in a genuine sci-fi narrative delivered through emails and messages as you play.

What the loop feels like

Your first weapon is literally called Tap. You click the moving Stickman, it drops energy orbs, and the orbs unlock automation: semi-automatic fire, then fully automatic weapons that keep beating the Stickman while your finger rests. Around you, Nebody messages you about system status and starts poking at what the network does not officially offer. That's Beat Stickman: Beyond.

A few hours in, the arena is a hazard zone: mines, spikes and rotating blades chew on the target passively while your arsenal of some 30 weapons rotates through upgrades, the bonus wheel spins for multipliers, and ascension resets convert your progress into raw damage. That's the arsenal chase.

The named systems doing the work

Active and idle attacks are the spine: clicks fire the target, energy orbs gate the automatic firing modes. The weapon unlock tree spans around 30 projectile and equipment weapons, each levelled individually for weapon stars, a secondary currency that empowers the rest of your gear. AoE traps add passive damage layers, missions and daily tasks pay bonus cash and upgrade points, the bonus wheel offers gambling-style boosts, and ascension resets amplify your damage baseline for the next loop. All of it is punctuated by narrative integration: the story advances through the in-game messaging system at level milestones.

Where it stumbles

The honest read from community discussion is that this is a novelty narrative experience more than a deep numbers game: compared to the statistical heavyweights of the genre, the automation and scaling are lighter, and the loop wears thin once the weapon novelty fades. Ascension sequences have drawn complaints for unskippable, slow animations that stall back-to-back progression. And the diegetic sci-fi operating system, charming as the emails are, clutters the interface in ways streamlined idlers avoid. For a deeper mechanical fix, the same developer's Beat Stickman: Infinity Clones and the catalogue's Tap Heroes go further.

Playing it today

Beat Stickman: Beyond is on Steam for Windows, Mac and Linux, released in September 2022 (A$ 14.50 at our check, with story DLC and quality-of-life updates added free post-launch per the developer's community posts). No mobile release surfaced in our platform check.

The verdict

A cheerful, story-flavoured clicker that succeeds at being a diverting evening or two of weapon unlocking and Stickman violence, and does not pretend to be more. Buy it for Nebody and the emails; stay for however long the wheel keeps spinning.