← HypercasualGames
Poki
Grounded
5/10

One Thumb Stick Raid

Hold to charge a stick hero's swipe arc, release to cut through crowds of enemies in tight arenas.

Core mechanic

Press and hold to wind up a swipe that sweeps through enemies; timing and arc length determine kills per swing.

Controls

Hold finger anywhere to charge swipe arc; release to swing; swipe direction while holding adjusts arc.

Theme

Minimalist stick-figure arenas with single-color silhouette enemies and blood splat VFX.

Why now

Stick Rush wave-shooter trend signals appetite for stickman combat games with upgrade loops.

Signals · overall 5/10
Hook
4/10

Charge-and-release swipe-arc cutting is essentially the same core verb as Poki's trending Slice Master (hurl knives to chop towers/obstacles) plus a stickman skin; differentiated only by timing/arc, which is a weak novelty.Slice Master uses the same press/aim/slice arc mechanic and is already trending on Poki.

Virality
6/10

Stickman combat and swipe-arc games demonstrably travel: Stick Rush and Slice Master both sit on Poki's trending web pages and the hypercasual top 100 hit 2.4B downloads H1 2025, so the mechanic is proven shareable/streamable.Stick Rush is featured on Poki's trending stickman category.Top 100 hypercasual games recorded 2.4B downloads and $345M IAP in H1 2025, confirming viral reach of the genre.

Simplicity
8/10

Single-finger hold-to-charge / release-to-swing with optional aim drift is trivially implementable — essentially one input, one collider, one sweep — and matches proven hypercasual input patterns.

Monetization
5/10

Ad-driven (interstitial + rewarded) monetization is standard and proven in this category, but pure arcade swipe-arc sessions are short and offer limited ad slots per play; revenue will rely on heavy UA and likely needs hybrid-casual upgrades.Report flags shift from pure hypercasual ads to hybrid-casual for sustainable monetization — bare swipe-arc loop is at the low end of LTV.

Whitespace
2/10

Crowded: Slice Master owns the swipe/arc cut loop, Stick Rush owns stickman wave-shooter, and multiple 'Stickman Survival' titles already fill the horde-survive niche on both App Store and Google Play. No clear differentiator found.Direct mechanic overlap with already-trending Slice Master.Multiple stickman horde-survival apps already competing in the same niche.Stick-slice puzzle subgenre already populated, adding to saturation.

Stick Rush · Trending on PokiPoki · 2026-07-17 (8d ago)