Stikbold! A Dodgeball Adventure takes a niche topic and gives it a quirky look with simplified controls to make a dodgeball game that is fun and accessible, if not a bit short until you convince some friends to learn how to handle this particular dodgeball experience.

Stikbold!'s graphics have a strong Katamari Damacy feel to them. Much like the gameplay, it doesn't try to go for an ultra-realistic visual style. Instead, the game uses blocky characters and set pieces that look more like stylized objects representing the arenas and obstacles than actual representations of those items. This simplified visual style goes a long way to giving off the arcade feel that the game presents. Of course, the fact that the gameplay has the camera pulled really far back so that the entire arena can be seen at once means that any fine details the game developers wanted to try and put into their models would be lost, so not only does the minimalistic visual style give the game a quirky look, but it has a practical reason as well.

Stikbold! continues its quirkiness in the audio department as well. While there is dialogue in the cutscenes, the language isn't quite English, but given how many of the words I understood, I'm pretty sure it wasn't the developers' native Danish either. What gets spoken is a pseudo-English that uses words that are just off, which causes it to become its own unique dialect. While amusing to hear, if you want to know what is actually being said, pay attention to the speech bubbles that pop up.

As for the rest of the game's sounds, the music is delightful and cheery, even when in the depths of Hell (yes, that's right, Hell) and the various sound effects that go off as objects are thrown, people are hit, or the environmental hazards are activated, also sound like they fit in the odd world where dodgeball appears to be everyone's answer to resolving all conflicts.

Stikbold! A Dodgeball Adventure's Story Mode follows two competitive Dodgeball players, Bjorn and Jerome. Tonight is the final game in a massive tournament where they will either be the winner or, according to their Coach, the first loser. Just as the opposing team walks into the gym, a strange man dressed in a devil suit appears, taking the other team and leaving behind nothing but an oily residue.

Of course, Coach wants to take this opportunity to claim victory right away, but our heroes won't have any of that. For one, they want a good game to prove that they can be the best. For another, Bjorn is in love with one of the kidnapped players.

The trail leads the pair on a strange adventure where they keep offending the strangest collections of people, and like I said above, it seems everyone here resolves their problems with a match of dodgeball. From the gym, the story will take the main characters to a city park, the beach, an oil refinery and finally, the depths of Hell itself. Each arena not only provides an interesting set of characters to face off against, but some location-specific hazards and even an unexpected challenge that makes Stikbold! a little more than just a dodgeball arcade game.

And trust me, on the simulator-to-arcade line, Stikbold! is about as far away from the realistic side as you can get. Outside of the way the game looks and sounds, the rules in this particular flavor of dodgeball aren't what you are used to. For one, just because a character is hit with the ball, he isn't necessarily out. Actually, getting hit once will only cause a ring of stars to appear around the player. A second hit while in this state, though, will put them out ... sort of.

With the exception of the hardest difficulty setting, when a character is knocked out, they can get a little encouragement from a teammate in order to get back into the game. If a teammate stays close to a fallen comrade for a bit of time, they will high-five and the player is back in the game. Of course, the time spent standing next to the other player kind of leaves the helping teammate exposed.

The rest of the dodgeball experience is all about getting the ball and launching it at opponents (or cars, or whales, or massive demons ... you know, the usual), though there can also be a good bit of strategy to this as well. Stikbold! allows you to fire the ball in a direction other than the way you are running, as well as putting a bit of a spin on your throw to get it to arc around pesky obstacles. All of these more advanced moves come with more playthroughs though because they can be hard to keep track of at first when you are just getting the hang of grabbing a ball and throwing it at the other team.

While the game's Story Mode is fun, it also boasts a Quick Match option to let you play against people or bots in a highly configurable matches. Match types are either team-based, or free-for-all, and your choices include the arenas and characters unlocked in the Story Mode. Oddly, Stikbold! doesn't have any online multiplayer, but given that everyone playing is in the same room, this dodgeball game can become a party game pretty fast.

Stikbold! A Dodgeball Adventure's Story Mode has three difficulty settings: Casual, Professional and All Star, and as you might expect, the higher settings have you facing tougher opponents, and while the Casual setting claims it is for younger players, my experience told me that this should really be your jumping off point in the game. While I rarely had trouble getting past the matches, it did help me really get a feel for the controls and how to play Stikbold!. With the learning curve pretty well addressed, the training wheels can come off and the Professional level shouldn't be too much of a problem. That being said, I still found one or two matches, particularly the Captain on the oil rig, to be a tough game, even on the Casual setting.

As for the All Star setting, even if you do work your way to the end of the Professional-level of the game, you will find yourself having difficulties in this mode, and no small part of that is the fact that teammates cannot be revived in All Star. Once a player is out, that's it, and I didn't quite realize how much I had been relying on my teammates and that feature until I started working my way through the All Star version of the story.

Stikbold! A Dodgeball Adventure is all about unrealistic arcade fun. The game's controls are simplified to make catching and throwing the ball as easy as possible, but it also includes a couple of features to add room to grow in both skill and strategy.

The basic catch and throw mechanics are fairly simple. One button lets you try to pick up a ball, and another fires it off in the direction you are facing. One of the tricks you can use after you've got the basics down is the fact that you can run in a different direction than you are facing. This is great for when both you and an opponent are going after the ball at the same time and you manage to pick it up. Even though you are both running in the same direction, you can, with practice, quickly switch to fire the ball behind you at the other player.

There is also a curveball feature that lets you add an arc to your projectile if you lean on one of the sticks after you've thrown the ball. This is a must-learn technique if you are going to get through some of the matches at the end of the Story Mode, but it is also a very handy trick to have up your sleeve when playing against human players.

These details and a few others are what makes Stikbold! a fun and unique experience. The game itself is short though, but the promise of being able to add some friends (who've had their own basic training) to the experience makes up for that shortness somewhat.