Dan The Man is a 2D platformer beat-'em up game, where the players have to complete sets of levels in worlds.

The player must traverse worlds with themes such as a grassy village, the sewers, but primarily of a kingdom.

[7][8] There are shops scattered around levels where the player can purchase items to help them at any time using coins[6] (the in-game currency).

The player can find ranged weapons in levels, which can be upgraded to increase their damage and effectiveness in the character menu.

[7] Dan and Josie have no special attributes while Barry has a shotgun attack with lower damage output, and the custom character has passive boosts to their stats depending on the clothes they wear.

There is an Easy, Normal, and Hard mode selection which impact the speed in which enemies get stronger every round, which get unlocked upon reaching a survival milestone.

During these battles, certain "special" enemies may appear, who when defeated, drop an amount of tokens depending on the difficulty, 1 in Easy, 2 in Normal, and 3 in Hard.

One of these people were Josie,[10] she and everyone else who was captured are put on a treadmill inside of the sewers of the kingdom, with guards preventing anyone who tries to escape.

Later on, Dan defeats three giant robots, the first being the one that terrorizes a village, the second guarding a castle, and the third being a crowd control vehicle.

When Dan reaches the top of the kingdom, he finds that there is a huge brawl occurring, with guns being shot and people collapsing onto the floor.

Josie is fighting a guard and the Advisor, and once Dan reaches up to them, he finds nobody there and walks up stairs.

After Dan defeats him, the ninja leader then reveals a push-button, and after pressing it, explodes everything.

The TouchArcade reviewer compares Dan The Man with other free mobile games such as Candy Crush Saga, praising Dan The Man for following the structure of "quality over quantity" with its long levels instead of having thousands of shorter levels like what Candy Crush provides.

"[11] Multiplayer.it eulogizes the game by saying, "Dan The Man is a traditional action platformer, but terribly solid and fun".

[19] 3D Juegos praises the game for its tight and precise controls, and the diversity of the player's moves and attacks.

They conclude that it has a "very successful and suggestive level design', precise controls, "high quality details", it is free-to-play but fair in its micro transactions, but that it also has a short story mode and criticizes the music, stating that "its soundtrack is quite repetitive".

[8] The Dan The Man web series is a series on YouTube originally uploaded by Studio JOHO (the Halfbrick Studios YouTube account reuploaded episodes 1-7, and posted episodes 8-13 on their channel exclusively[20][21]).

[22] The series, much like the video game, follows Dan, as he tries to find love while defeating threats that come his way, and eventually tries to "overthrow" the King.

After Stage 7's release, the web series went on hiatus for 44 months, and after that, Stage 8 was released (which had a very similar but different plot compared to the actual game), and the web series then had another hiatus which lasted 57 months.