Kick The Buddy Remastered is a sandbox game developed by Playgendary, the folks behind titles such as Bouncemasters and Escape Masters, where you beat the literal stuffing out of a ragdoll with a variety of tools and gadgets. You can grab him by the legs or arms and throw him around the screen at your leisure, but using the tools is the only way to earn money. In turn, you can use the money to buy new tools and continue the cycle of pain.
Bladed weapons, firearms, and explosives are just the start of it, allowing you to set him on fire, beat him with various cudgels, and more. This game is reminiscent of Interactive Buddy, an otherwise unrelated Flash game released in the mid-2000s. The main difference between the two games is the level of interaction you have with The Buddy.
Where Interactive Buddy allows you to also play with The Buddy, Kick The Buddy Remastered only allows you to hurt The Buddy by any means necessary. Although it may come off mean (it is a ragdoll at the end of the day), it is a pretty good way to release stress.
Money is not used on just tools and gadgets. You can also spend your earned Cash to customize the appearance of the ragdoll, as well as his room. This game is stuffed with ads however, so unless you spend some money to get rid of them, you can expect your experience to be interrupted. We have figured out a way to avoid the ads temporarily. However, your overall progress may be stifled while you are using it. There is a monthly VIP subscription that disables ads along with daily rewards, as well as a separate option that disables the ads right there via in-app purchases. Our Kick The Buddy Remastered guide will focus on gaining progress without spending money.
Kick The Buddy has no real objectives besides torture, so it works well as a distraction or, as mentioned earlier, as a stress reliever. You can get creative and combine these methods to really beat the snot out of The Buddy, but he will get exhausted after enough abuse and you will not be able to hurt him after a while. The constant bombardment of ads can get quite grating, so our Kick The Buddy Remastered guide will help you get the most out of this game. Buckle up with us to learn the myriad of ways to beat up this unfortunate dummy.
1. Smiling Through The Pain
After starting up the game, you will be facing The Buddy who is standing in a cardboard box. At first, you will not have anything to torment him with aside from grabbing one of his limbs and throwing him around the screen. The game does give you some money to buy some starting tools. There are two currencies in Kick The Buddy: Gold and Cash. Cash is the main currency that can buy most things in the game, and is earned by harming or killing The Buddy . Gold is the premium currency of the game and is obtained via in-app purchases. You can, however, earn a small amount from time to time by watching an ad.
All your available equipment is divided into groups based on what sort of items they are. At the time of this writing, there are 14 categories of items, but only ten of them are available to actually use:
- Firearms: Pistols, shotguns, and machine guns. Anything that launches lead goes here.
- Cold weapons: A confusingly-named category, this is where melee weapons and “low-tech” ranged weapons like shuriken are found.
- Explosives: Anything that goes boom can be found here. From lowly grenades all up to nukes.
- Objects: “Generic” objects such as children’s blocks and rolling pins.
- Foods: Edibles to pelt at The Buddy, such as pies and tomatoes. Sadly, you cannot feed these to The Buddy.
- Liquids: Most of the stuff found here relates to water, but there are some exotic choices like liquid nitrogen.
- Machines: Whether manually powered or automatic, you can find them here.
- Animals: Call upon the forces of nature to wreak havoc on The Buddy.
- Horror: A spooky set of Halloween-themed items.
- Power of Gods: Divine intervention to punish The Buddy.
The items listed here can hurt The Buddy in various ways. At its simplest, some of them require the player to throw them at The Buddy to injure him. All the listed firearms and some select weapons require the player to aim them first so they can hit The Buddy instead. Some items in the Machines category are more or less stationary and require the player to move The Buddy to them in order to have an effect.
One particular Machine is a vice that gradually closes the walls in and crushes The Buddy in the process. This will require the player to manually tighten the vice in order to do so. When The Buddy is crushed, you will have to loosen the vice in order for The Buddy to respawn.
Most of the items you can find here will cost Cash or Gold, but some items have alterative means to unlock them. There are login bonuses that you can claim every day, and range between sums of Gold and Cash.
Some items require a VIP access subscription which is only accessible via in-app purchases. One last group of items requires you to watch a set number of ads in order to unlock them, though you can skip the process for each item with Gold. Any ads you have watched beforehand, even to unlock other items will not count; you will have to watch ads in order to obtain all the weapons.
Fortunately, the items you can purchase with in-game currencies are sufficient for progress, if time-consuming. A handful of items in the categories above have yet to be added into the game, and we are not sure if they are purchasable or if they require VIP access. Even then, any purchases have to be downloaded first before you can use them. In the event you have to reinstall Kick The Buddy Remastered for whatever reason, you can restore your purchases through the Options, so progress is not lost if you have to free up space on your device.
Injuring The Buddy earns you Cash at a fairly slow rate, though you can combine forms of damage to increase the rate of Cash generation. You can even “spawn” up to two instances of items by using your fingers, but it is tricky to use especially with things that are thrown or aimed. The Buddy is active and will move and jump around, talking to you from time to time. You can disable his speech via the Extras menu if it gets annoying.
The Buddy is not invincible however, and he can only take so much damage before getting knocked out, at which point he will not respond to any attack on him whatsoever. Despite this, he cannot be truly “killed,” even if you slice him to pieces, empty a machine gun magazine into his body, blow him up with landmines, or feed him to a shark. He will return to the screen after a short period of time, though depending on what is on the screen, he might get himself knocked out yet again.
Should The Buddy get knocked out, you will also gain some extra Cash and an optional reward will pop up on the screen. If you choose to accept it, you will watch an ad that will give you more Cash, and you can watch another ad to double it. The Cash reward from this process can range from 50 to 300 without the multiplier, so it is effectively a gamble for extra Cash in exchange for your time. You can skip the reward process altogether by waiting for a large X to appear on the upper right corner. Either way, The Buddy is revived and ready for more suffering.
As for Gold, the game does give you some free Gold every five minutes in exchange for watching an ad. Much like the Cash reward above, you can watch another ad to double the earned Gold at your leisure, or just take the Gold as is. In the event that there are too many things on screen for you to handle, there is a trash can at the lower right of the screen.
Tap it twice and all items on the screen along with The Buddy will be removed and The Buddy will spawn right back at the center, no worse for wear. Even explosives that run on timed fuses are pulled in without setting them off.
Even if you decide not to watch ads at all, your gameplay will be interrupted by ads every few minutes, even while selecting items to use on The Buddy. This can get annoying really fast, and hampers game progress. You can choose to disable the ads by purchasing the option, or by getting VIP access. Access is billed to your phone, and not only does it disable ads and give you some new tools to play with, but it also gives you a fair amount of Gold and Cash on a daily basis.
The game encourages you to take this offer, but it is not necessary and we have ways to get some progress done without spending any money. VIP access exists for the sake of convenience. If the ads are too much, but VIP access sounds like overkill, you can simply disable ads using real-world money. Regardless, the rate you earn Cash is limited because the dummy can get knocked out, resulting in some downtime before the dummy gets back up.
2. Decorating The Dummy
It is not just weapons you can spend your currencies on in Kick The Buddy. There are variety of customization options to change up The Buddy’s look. These are split between shirts for The Buddy, sorted in “Extras,” as well as new backgrounds sorted in “Décor,” and generally cost much more than the items you use on the buddy. Some of these customizations are also limited to VIP access. When selecting clothes, The Buddy will wear the first selected shirt in the menu, a yellow jersey.
It is not much, but it does give you one form of customization without spending anything. Seeing as they are cosmetics, they will not change The Buddy’s behavior that much, and are used to spice up your torture sessions or to share funny images with friends. Some of the things you can get will make your device vibrate while they are in use, though you can disable this if this is not to your liking.
As expected, The Buddy will show damage from every attack you do, barring being thrown around the screen. Bullets will embed themselves into his body, parts of him will be sliced off (though not entire limbs), bruises will form after hitting him with blunt instruments, and his head can even be chopped off with certain items.
All this is depicted without any sort of blood to keep ratings low, but the game lets you purchase a toggle that enables blood from the settings, just below the speech option. However, some items produce rather gory deaths even without blood turned on, which can shock unsuspecting players who do not want to spend real money. Proceed with caution when buying those items.
Also available from the Extras menu is a Statistics list that documents the amount of damage you have inflicted on The Buddy, along with how much Cash you have spent and how long The Buddy has been around. There is even a statistic for how much pea soup you have poured on The Buddy, which you can purchase at the Food section if you wish.
3. Mastering The Art Of Torture
Though playing Kick The Buddy can get difficult due to the ad interruptions, we have some tips and recommended starting purchases so you can farm for Cash in peace:
- As we mentioned before, the login rewards of Kick The Buddy offer a couple of free weapons and these weapons are earned within five non-consecutive days of logins. The first weapon you will get is a pair of claws that will easily kill The Buddy in a few swipes. The second weapon is a torch that is much more effective in making money.
It sets The Buddy on fire, and you earn money as The Buddy burns. You can stack the damage through other means and increase the amount of Cash generated before The Buddy is knocked out. The torch can even be used as a bludgeon to earn more Cash as The Buddy burns.
- Ads will only load when you start the game with an active internet connection. Disabling your connection before loading the game will let you play without interruptions, but you will be unable to buy anything as the game has to download a newly-purchased object before you can use it.
Therefore, buy whatever weapons you fancy and let them download before restarting the game without a connection. Remember that The Buddy still has limited health, and disabling the internet connection of your device will not change that. - While it sounds counter-intuitive, letting The Buddy recover from a beating can be much faster than killing him and waiting for the respawn. Assuming you are connected to the internet, you will be interrupted by the optional Cash reward which you can only close after a few seconds of waiting. In comparison, letting The Buddy heal, which is shown by any injuries fading away, will let you pummel him immediately, provided ads do not get in the way.
This also means that items that kill The Buddy in one go are less cost-effective as while you will get a sizeable payout for the deed, you will have to wait for The Buddy to recover and potentially get interrupted by an ad in the process.
- When it comes to purchasable items, consider getting the following things first, as they are cheap to get:
Berreta: A simple pistol that does not need to reload, it is a good way to harm The Buddy for cheap, especially if you aim two of them at once. Aiming two guns is tricky, but it does increase the rate at which you earn Cash. The constant barrage of bullets will get you Cash at a decent rate until The Buddy is knocked out or you hold your fire.
Sawblade: Available from the Cold Weapons section, the Sawblade takes some time to warm up but eventually starts shredding The Buddy. One technique to earn fast Cash is to wedge The Buddy into a corner with the Sawblade active. You will know it is working if you hear constant smacking noises as the game tries to move The Buddy back in place, all while you gain Cash quite quickly until you let The Buddy go or if he passes out.
Set The Buddy on fire for more Cash, or you can spawn two sawblades and squeeze them together. Be careful about the latter option as the game can lag due to the amount of particle effects it has to generate while the sawblades are active and slashing The Buddy.
- On the other hand, there are some items that are not worth purchasing as they generate Cash too slowly. The children’s blocks you can find in the Objects section are one such example, as you need to throw them at The Buddy or spawn them directly above him to deal damage. There also does not seem to be a way to pull them directly to The Buddy to make them repeatedly collide with him. Unless you are trying to get a complete set of equipment, there is no real reason to buy this.
There are some items that deal no damage whatsoever, and mainly interact with other things to get their full effects. For instance, there are various sources of water you can purchase in Kick The Buddy: Rain from the Power of Gods section, and a fire hose from the Liquids section. These items only really exist to put The Buddy out if he is on fire. The room cannot be flooded and there are currently no means to shock The Buddy; their overall use is limited unless you are feeling merciful.
As we discussed above, things that instantly kill The Buddy are less cost-effective than other methods. Some of them can get pretty expensive and it can take some time to recoup their costs outside of ad rewards or login bonuses. You also cannot combine them with other methods, so the Cash earned from them cannot be increased. - Once you start stocking up on items and money, the only real limit is your imagination and ad interruptions. Go crazy with what items you have to bring the pain. As an example, you can sic a swarm of hornets onto The Buddy then set him on fire with the torch. Proceed to beat The Buddy senseless with the torch until he keels over. Remember that once The Buddy falls unconscious, you will have to wait a while before you can start hurting him again. You can use that time to remove any existing items on the screen in exchange for new ones.
And that ends our guide to Kick The Buddy Remastered. It can be rather difficult with all the ads getting in the way, but follow our suggestions and buy a few things before shutting your internet connection off for another go. That way you can earn Cash in peace to buy better things to knock The Buddy out with.
You will not be able to earn Gold this way, but all the Cash-purchasable items do the job without issue. The lack of Gold is no match for all the ways you can combine the items for some really creative injuries. If you guys have any tips you would like to share with us, let us know in the comment section! Have fun, and game on!