Drunken Duel 2

Sequels to physics games usually add graphics. Drunken Duel 2 changed the verb. In the first game you shot a man until his energy bar ran out; here you shoot him until he falls off a roof. The whole match now hangs on knockback rather than damage, and once you notice that, everything else the sequel added makes sense — the weapons, the crates, the helicopter, all of it exists to move a ragdoll a few metres sideways.

The setup is two drunk stickmen, one blue and one orange, on the flat roof of a building with wooden crates between them for cover. Neither can aim. Each player has exactly one key, and the arm swings continuously whether you like it or not. Press the key and the weapon fires wherever it is pointing. The shot that lands is worth nothing on its own; what matters is the direction it shoves the other figure, and whether that direction ends at the edge.

Then there is the part nobody expects. A helicopter circles above the roof. Sometimes it drops crates into the arena, which is a nuisance. Sometimes you shoot it, in which case it comes down on your opponent and you take the point. It is the only object in either Drunken game that can kill someone on your behalf.

Drunken Duel 2 was built by HiHoy Games in Denizli, Turkey, and published by RHM Interactive OÜ of Tallinn. That credit needs a note, because the distributors disagree with the file. GameMonetize and CrazyGames both list RHM Interactive as the developer, since RHM is the account that uploaded the game. The build tells a different story: its Construct 3 metadata names hihoygames as the author, its package id is com.hihoy.ragduel — the same project as the first game — and its ragdoll is still assembled from Turkish part names. Where the two sources conflict, the file wins, and the distributor agrees on the first game anyway: GameMonetize files Drunken Duel itself under Hihoy Games. GameMonetize published this build on 13 November 2020; CrazyGames dates its own copy 13 December 2020. It has comfortably outgrown the original: 8.7 out of 10 from 8,500 ratings on CrazyGames, split 7,375 up against 1,125 down, and 4.3 out of 5 from 8,545 votes on TwoPlayerGames.org, roughly twice what the first Drunken Duel has collected there.

The weapon is dealt to you, not chosen

The single biggest change from the original is that Drunken Duel 2 stops giving both players the same pistol. Four weapon types rotate through the match at random: conventional handguns, thrown shurikens, ray guns, and a stubby hand-held bazooka. You do not select them and you cannot keep one you like.

That is not a cosmetic list. Each weapon has its own recoil on the shooter and its own knockback on the target, so the arithmetic of "how many hits does it take to push him over" resets every time the game hands you something new. The bazooka against a pistol is a real advantage for a round. The randomness is also what stops a match between two evenly matched people from settling into one repeated winning move, which is a problem the first game does have.

Why real duellists missed about as often as these two do

The comedy in Drunken Duel 2 is that nobody can shoot straight. The historical footnote is that this was closer to normal than the movies suggest.

Formal duelling pistols were smoothbore — no rifling in the barrel. Not because rifling was unavailable, but because it was considered unsporting: a rifled barrel made hitting too likely, and duellists preferred the weapon that gave both men a better chance of walking away. Ignition was unreliable too. Flintlocks misfired between 10% and 20% of the time; only when percussion caps took over in the 1830s did that fall below 5%. Historians put the fatality rate of pistol duels across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at roughly 10% to 20%, lower than the sword duels they replaced. In England the distance settled from the 1760s at eight to fifteen paces, most often twelve.

The American frontier version is further still from its reputation. The stand-off in the street barely happened; historians treat it as a film convention, since real gunfights were ambushes and drunken arguments. The canonical exception is Wild Bill Hickok and Davis Tutt, in the town square of Springfield, Missouri, on 21 July 1865 — a quarrel over a Waltham pocket watch Tutt had taken as collateral in a poker game, Hickok insisting the debt was $25 and Tutt that it was $35. They faced each other at about 75 yards, roughly the length of a football pitch, and most witnesses heard only one shot. It is one of the few recorded one-on-one quick-draw duels in a public place in the Old West. Hickok was acquitted on 6 August 1865.

So a duel decided by a wobbling arm, a weapon you did not choose and a piece of falling machinery is not as silly as it looks. Chance was always the loudest participant.

What Drunken Duel 2 changed

The controls did not move — W and the up arrow, one key each, exactly as in Drunken Duel. The match length did not move either: first to five, in both. Three things did.

The win condition. The original decides rounds with an energy bar and a hit-location damage model — a foot is worth about 5% of it, a torso hit about 20%, a headshot the whole thing. Drunken Duel 2 throws all of that out and scores on the fall. The arena. Flat ground with a couple of breakable bottles becomes a rooftop with a lethal drop, crates for cover and an aircraft overhead. The weapon. One pistol for everyone becomes four types on a random rotation. If you want the sharper, more readable duel, play the first one; if you want the one that produces better accidents, this is it.

Two players, one roof

Drunken Duel 2 is built for the couch first, and the one-key scheme is why it works there. Neither player has a keyboard advantage, neither needs an explanation longer than a sentence, and a match to five is over in two or three minutes. On a tablet the two buttons sit in opposite bottom corners and two people share the screen without a cable or an account.

It also loads on anything: a single HTML5 page, no installer and no plugin, which is why it turns up on unblocked lists. A Chromebook, a school browser or a locked-down work laptop opens it in a tab like an ordinary web page. Press play above and it runs inside this one.

More games by HiHoy Games

If the rooftop version leaves you wanting the tighter original, it is right here: Drunken Duel — literally the same Construct 3 project, one arena earlier. For the studio's other side of the same idea, Stick Duel: Medieval Wars hands each fighter two keys and a polearm and runs on the same Box2D physics. Robbery Duel and Stick Fighter 3D are the rest of what GameMonetize files under Hihoy Games.

Drunken Table Wars belongs on the same side of that line: RHM publishes it under the series name, but its build carries HiHoy's package id and wordmark. The rest of the Drunken shelf really does share only the publisher — Drunken Boxing and Drunken Tug War name no studio inside the file at all. For twelve one-key duels in one package there is 12 MiniBattles. More in our action category.

1. Pick your mode and your colour. 1 Player puts you against the CPU, 2 Player puts a friend on the other end of the roof. Blue is on the left, orange on the right.
2. Find your key. Player 1 fires with W, Player 2 with the up arrow. Alone, the left mouse button works too. On touch screens, one button per bottom corner.
3. Read the weapon you were given. It is dealt, not chosen, and the four types push very differently. Check what is in your hand before you commit to a plan.
4. Aim at the roof edge, not at the man. Points come from the fall. A shot that lands cleanly but pushes your opponent inwards has done you no good at all.
5. Get to five. Five knock-offs wins the match, and rounds reset fast enough that a match rarely runs past three minutes.

What you learn after a dozen rounds:

• Push, don't hit. The scoring rule rewards angle over accuracy. A glancing shot from the inside of the roof is worth more than a solid one that plants your opponent on his feet.
• Recoil is your movement key. Every shot shoves you as well. If you are drifting towards your own edge, a shot fired outward is the only brake you have.
• The crates cut both ways. The boxes between the duellists block your shot and theirs. Standing behind one buys you time; standing behind one with a bazooka wastes the round.
• Take the helicopter only when it lines up. Shooting it down is a free point if it is over your opponent and a wasted second if it is over you.
• The turn after a new weapon is the dangerous one. A shuriken or a ray gun changes how far the other figure travels and how far you recoil, and you find out mid-round.