Stick RPG 2

Remember playing that old game, "Stick RPG", a few years ago? It was a short, simple little game consisted mostly of grinding one's stats until you could meet a benchmark for a promotion of some type, which then allotted you more money to buy things with which further helped your stats and the loop continued so on for about 4 hours, and then you had pretty much maxed everything there was to max out. Something about the game kept you playing, despite the fact that it was merely a game about watching numbers go up, and reading a new line of dialogue once every 15 minutes. Xgen Studios Stick RPG 2 takes the same exact game play and greatly expands on it, offering a huge amount of jobs, three city blocks, and quite a few new random type events that seldom happened in the first game. In essence, its much, much more of the same.

The Highlights
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The first thing you'll notice about the game, it that there is a lot of stuff. three over world maps,  two casinos, six food shops, two gyms, three bars, two general stores, and over ten different employers man that there is a lot to do in this game, and the side quests are quite involved. The stats system works well, given that the main focus of every stat is now the same, that being job advancement, and the three best jobs in the game all require at least one of the three stats, as well as a particular karma rating.

The dialogue is interesting, and while you wont want to read the stat gain screen message 50 times in a row, you will want to read it at least once. There are cute little Easter eggs scattered throughout the game, and many of these actually can serve the purpose of advancing the plot. The game also has added a couple more RPG elements. The background trait you take at the beginning of the game can help quite a bit, and it's a nice feature for any RPG. The banking with compounded daily interest is still there but it seems a lot less efficient than the previous game. The days are much longer, and the general interest build is down, meaning living purely off your bank account is harder.

The Downsides
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First and foremost, from a technical standpoint, this game is prone to crashing, and hogs CPU resources like very few other flash games can. I'd recommend saving at the end of each day, because the game crashed on me four times in my six hours of playing it, and three other times I was forced to reload the game, as the game trapped me in a dialogue I couldn't escape. It shouldn't cause too much of a problem if you remember to save frequently, but if you don't, going back 7+ days can really suck.

As for the storyline, its about 5 minutes long, and pops up out one of many random fetch quest the game invites you to partake in. The fact that the game has three different endings is interesting, but the fact that you essentially choose your own ending blindly with no way of viewing the others kind of bites. In order to see the other two endings, you have to go through the gauntlet of light saber and electro shock using enemies, which really gets to be grating by the third time.

Overall, its a very fun waste of time, and its a great sandbox rpg with lots of little hidden secrets, it's just a shame that the story was done as it was, and it'd would've also been nice if there was some way to fight enemies more than once.