Electric Man 2

By the time Electric Man 2 was spreading across Newgrounds, Kongregate, Stickpage and Armor Games in early 2007, the stick-figure fighting game was already a crowded Flash sub-genre, descended from the Xiao Xiao animation series and its many playable imitators. Most of that wave amounted to a punch button, a kick button, and a health bar. Electric Man 2, built solo by an Australian developer who went by "Roboman" on Albino Blacksheep before the game carried his real name, Damien Clarke, is the rarer entry that actually thought about what a stick-figure fighter's combat could do that a real fighting game's couldn't.

The battery is the whole design

The core loop is a straightforward tournament ladder: fight a numbered team of opponents, win, move to the next team, eventually reach a final boss fight against Death and a wave of skeleton adds. What separates it from its contemporaries sits underneath that structure. Alongside a regular punch/kick/grab set mapped to A, S and D, the player carries a regenerating "battery" meter that fuels slow-motion special moves triggered on Q, W and E. Slow it down to line up a grab that would otherwise whiff, or to escape a surrounded position, and the meter drains; hold back and it refills. That's a small addition, but it turns every exchange into an actual decision — spend the resource now on a flashy escape, or bank it for the one grapple that really needs the extra frames — in a genre where most competitors offered nothing to decide between beyond mashing the attack key faster. The grab-and-throw system layered on top gives the moment-to-moment combat a rock-paper-scissors read that plain punch-trading fighters of the period didn't bother with.

None of this makes Electric Man 2 a deep fighting game by the standards of anything with a coin slot behind it. It's still a small, free browser tournament with a handful of enemy archetypes and no meaningful difficulty options. But judged against the low bar most of its 2006–07 stick-figure peers set — and against the real constraint of one person building an entire fighting engine, animation set and tournament structure inside a Flash file meant to load instantly over a home connection — the battery mechanic is a genuinely considered piece of design, not a reskin of a better game wearing a different stick figure.

A portal game without a portal

Electric Man 2's distribution history is unusually open for its era. A large share of mid-2000s Flash hits were funded by an exclusive sponsorship: a single portal paid for a period of exclusivity, and the game was effectively unavailable anywhere else for months. Electric Man 2 doesn't appear to have worked that way. It turns up, with only cosmetic differences, on Newgrounds, Kongregate, Stickpage and Armor Games alike, all seemingly running the same free game funded by whatever advertising each host wrapped around it rather than by the game charging for anything itself. The one confirmed arrangement on record is that Free World Group partnered with Clarke to add a leaderboard and a skippable tutorial for an enhanced "Electric Man 2 HS" build, which is also the version carrying the earliest date this review could pin down with more than one source agreeing: Kongregate's own listing gives 24 February 2007, and the Internet Archive's catalogue entry for a separate Newgrounds-specific build — notable for swapping in original Damien Clarke music instead of licensed tracks, presumably to sidestep copyright trouble on that portal — gives 10 February 2007, matched independently by the LaunchBox Games Database. Neither this review nor any source it checked could substantiate a 2005 release date for this title, so it isn't repeated here as fact; the honest position is that the game's original, non-HS build likely predates February 2007 by some margin, given Clarke's own bio places him posting to Albino Blacksheep from around 2006, but a precise date for that earlier build could not be confirmed.

Where the ladder runs out

Set against that clever combat layer, the tournament structure itself is the weak half of the package. There's no persistent progression between fights beyond picking a fighter's name and colour at the start — no unlockable moves, no currency, no meta-game pulling a player back after the credits roll on the Death fight. There's also no multiplayer of any kind, local or online, which is a real absence for a combat engine this deliberately built around reading an opponent's options. For a free single-sitting portal game in 2007 that was a reasonable trade; it meant the whole experience fit in one file and one afternoon. Measured today, it means the ceiling on how much time Electric Man 2 rewards is genuinely low — clear the ladder once, and there is nothing in the design asking for a second run beyond nostalgia.

Playability today

The original Flash Player is gone, and Electric Man 2 has not aged out of that transition cleanly. Armor Games' current page for the game states outright that it is not available there — checked 5 September 2026 — and points visitors toward unrelated Ruffle-compatible titles instead. A Ruffle compatibility issue (ruffle-rs/ruffle#9594) that remains open documents specific, reproducible problems running the game's AVM1 (ActionScript 1/2) code: skipping past a tutorial exercise leaves that exercise's enemies queued to spawn into the menu screen rather than removed, and at least one match later in the ladder can fail to register that the last opponent has been defeated, blocking further progress outright. The same report notes the HS edition, which allows skipping the tutorial cleanly, is "far more playable" in Ruffle than the plain original, without being fully fixed. What survives are multiple Internet Archive uploads of both the original and HS builds, playable in-browser through Ruffle emulation with those caveats attached, plus whatever copies Flashpoint-style local emulation setups carry — this review did not confirm a specific Flashpoint curation entry for this title and is not claiming one. No Wikipedia article exists for the game, which is itself a data point about its scale relative to the small tier of Flash titles that earned encyclopedia-level coverage.

Final verdict

Electric Man 2 deserves better than to be remembered as one more stick-figure brawler from the Xiao Xiao years. The slow-motion battery meter is a real piece of design thinking that most of its contemporaries skipped, and the fact that a solo developer's game travelled across every major portal of 2007 without an exclusivity fight is a fair, independently-checkable measure of how well it was regarded. It was never going to be a deep game — the ladder is short, there's no multiplayer, and nothing invites a second run once it's cleared — and today that shallow ceiling is compounded by a documented, still-open emulation bug and a primary modern host that has simply taken the page down. A 6.5 reflects a genuinely well-made small fighter, honestly limited by its own scope even at launch, now additionally taxed by the ordinary decay of Flash preservation.

Players interested in the wider stick-figure combat lineage this game grew out of should look at Madness Interactive, a fan game built on the same animation tradition from a different angle. Anyone drawn to the ragdoll-physics side of 2000s Flash combat rather than the tournament-fighter side should try Happy Wheels instead.