Stickman Gun Shooter 3D

Open the developer tools while this game loads and you can read exactly what you are about to play. The build is a Unity 2018.3.3f1 WebGL package, roughly 18 MB across three files, and inside it are 33 scenes: a menu, two gameplay shells, twenty campaign levels named Level1 to Level20, and eight survival arenas. No portal that lists this game says any of that. It is worth knowing before you start, because the shape of the game is not obvious from the first screen.

What makes it a game rather than a shooting gallery is the thing it takes away from you: you never choose a weapon. There is no loadout, no shop full of guns, no reload. Twelve weapon models exist in the build, and the campaign scatters 135 spawn points across its twenty levels; what you are holding at any moment is whatever you last walked over. The ammo bar drains, the gun goes quiet, and the level turns into a scavenger hunt with stickmen shooting at you. The first four levels do not even have spawners — they hand you fixed AK-47s, which is the game teaching you the loop before it takes the safety net away.

Every death is a ragdoll. Nothing plays a canned death animation; hit stickmen fold up and slide down the concrete under physics, which is the appeal of the whole genre and the reason the App Store rates this 18+ despite a cast made of black ovals. Enemies come in five kinds — a rifle stickman in a soldier helmet, a melee stickman that runs at you, a water-gun stickman, a lava ball, and a spider with its own ragdoll.

It was built by Best Games Studios, who publish on the App Store under the name Iurii Nikshych. The iOS original went up on 19 August 2016 and sits at 4.5 out of 5 from 87 ratings; the browser conversion reached GameMonetize on 28 November 2019, and the build served today was compiled on 26 March 2020.

Twenty levels, eight survival arenas, and a multiplayer mode that never opens

The level select is a scrolling list of twenty. What the scene list shows, and the menu does not, is how deliberately they are staged: levels 1 to 5 are streets, barriers and bunkers; 6 and 13 put a battleship with five turrets in the middle of the map, with wheeled cannons on the second visit; 7 to 9 add a castle and a control tower; 10 and 11 move indoors into a hangar and an infirmary; 12 introduces the lava ball; 14 is tunnels and ramps; 16 and 17 flood the map; and 18 to 20 are set in orbit, among asteroids, cranes and alien cocoons.

Survival is the other half: eight arenas, each with an objective pair — survive n seconds and kill n stickmen — and up to three stars. The build names the variants Normal, Grenades, Hell, Water and Fire Wars, so you know what you are walking into before you press start. One arena is a beach with palm trees and a zeppelin hanging over it.

And then there is the part that never opens. The build contains a complete multiplayer front end — a create-game screen with a map selector, a Max Players field, a Cycle Maps switch and a toggle labelled "Add Bots when too few players" — inherited from the studio's sibling game, Stickman Multiplayer Shooter. The browser menu never shows the button. The online mode is not broken here; it is simply not exposed.

Every gun in the game, and why you never get to pick one

Twelve weapon models sit in the stickman's weapon rig: two pistols, an Uzi, a machine gun, an M16, an AK-47, a shotgun, a sniper rifle, two generic rifles, a water gun and a flamethrower. Ten of them exist as pickup prefabs you can find on the ground; the rest appear as level furniture.

The interesting bit is the plumbing. The game keeps a table for each weapon's maximum ammo, damage and range, and a fourth that maps every gun to one of only four arm poses — no weapon, rifle, machine gun, pistol. That is the trick that lets a tiny team ship twelve guns: the stickman has four ways of holding something, and the guns are swapped into his hands like props.

Each spawner is configured individually — some allow pistols only, some are grenade-only, some force a single gun type, and every one keeps a minimum distance from the player so a weapon never lands in your lap. If you want a specific gun, the answer is not a menu; it is learning where that map puts it.

Why the stick figure became a whole genre in the browser

There is a reason the browser is full of stickman games and not, say, full of games about photoreal soldiers. The stick figure is the cheapest human being to draw and the cheapest to animate, and it is also the most legible: it carries no age, no clothing, no face to get wrong. Wikipedia traces the form back more than 30,000 years, to rock art like the Mimi figures at Anbangbang in Australia and the Indalo in Spain.

Design keeps rediscovering it for the same reason. Otto Neurath built ISOTYPE on stick figures in 1925 to make statistics readable without words; the 1964 Tokyo Olympics used pictograms by Masaru Katsumi and Yoshiro Yamashita; and in 1974 the US Department of Transportation commissioned the AIGA to produce the 34 — later 50 — symbols still standing in airports today. Stick figures, as Wikipedia puts it, are recognised regardless of language, location and demographic.

The web picked all of this up in the Flash era. Xiao Xiao, by the Beijing animator Zhu Zhiqiang, put its first episode on Newgrounds on 19 April 2001 and ran ten episodes until February 2002; some of them were interactive rather than passive, which is the moment stickman animation turned into stickman gaming. Alan Becker's Animator vs. Animation followed on 3 June 2006, made in Macromedia Flash, and has since collected around 80 million views on YouTube.

Flash died. The stickman did not, because what made it work in Flash — one character, no texture budget, physics doing the acting — is exactly what a small studio needs to ship a 3D game to a browser tab. You can see the economics on screen here: the entire world is one grey-white prototype prop kit sharing six 2048-pixel textures, and the art budget goes into the ragdoll.

Playing Stickman Gun Shooter 3D unblocked at school

There is nothing to install, no plugin and no account, so the game runs on a locked-down school Chromebook exactly as it runs on a gaming PC, as long as the page gets through the filter. Press play at the top and the game starts right here in the page.

Two honest warnings. It is not small — about 18 MB has to arrive before the menu appears, and the game reserves 256 MB of memory, so on a shared connection you will watch the Unity loading bar for a while. And there is an interstitial ad before the game plus the studio's own consent panel on first launch; accept or decline it and the menu comes up either way. Progress, coins and unlocked levels live in your browser, so they survive a refresh but not a different machine.

More stickman and shooting games

If it was the stick figures you came for, Stick Duel: Medieval Wars turns the same cast into a two-player physics duel, and Stickman Ghost Online takes them into a side-scrolling action game with an actual progression system.

If it was the shooting, Warfare Area is a heavier 3D shooter with recognisable soldiers, Hunter Assassin removes guns from the player entirely and makes you hunt armed men with a knife and a lot of patience, and Drunken Duel 2 shrinks the whole idea to two stickmen on a rooftop and a race to five knockdowns. Or browse the whole action category.

1. Pick Level 1. It is the only one open. Levels unlock in order, so 2 through 20 stay greyed out until you finish the one before. The Survival button below the list is a separate track with its own eight arenas.
2. Move with the arrow keys or WASD, turn by dragging. Left and right, forward and back — the four directions are on both the arrows and WASD. Horizontal mouse drag swings the view, and a button spins you a full 180° when something is behind you.
3. Hold Left Ctrl to fire. Space jumps. G throws a grenade if the counter beside the button is above zero.
4. Walk over guns. Weapons lie on the ground and on crates. Picking one up replaces what you are carrying, ammo and all, so think before you stand on a pistol while holding a full shotgun.
5. Reach the end trigger. Levels 1 to 15 are laid out as a route with enemies placed along it and a finish at the far end. Levels 16 to 20 switch to spawners, which means enemies keep arriving until you leave.

Five things the build tells you that the game does not:

• Health is scarce. No heart pickup exists anywhere in the first eight levels, and even after that only some maps carry one or two. Most of the campaign is fought on whatever health you have left.
• Levels 1 to 4 are the tutorial. They contain zero weapon spawners and a set of fixed AK-47s. If the game suddenly feels harder at level 5, that is why — from there on, your gun is whatever the map gives you.
• The water gun and the flamethrower are real weapons, not jokes. Both have their own impact effects and their own spawner flags. The flamethrower has exactly three dedicated spawn points in the whole game.
• Grenades are rationed. Fourteen fixed grenade pickups exist across the campaign, plus nine grenade-only spawners. Throwing them at the first stickman you see is how you arrive at level 18 with none.
• Watch the terrain change. The campaign starts in a white concrete city, passes a battleship with five gun turrets, a hangar, a lava level and a stretch of water, and ends among asteroids and alien cocoons. Level 20 is set in space.