[b]‘Crucify him!’[/b]
[i]Dog on a Stick[/i] is a [i]Putt-Putt[/i] spin-off centred on Pep collecting bones and other treats on tiled maps. The plot is that the automobile and his canine companion went to the dump to drop off some recyclables, wherein the canid found a pogo stick. We never receive an explanation as to how this lead him to leaping around tiles collecting bones all over the world. You know why? Because the designers didn’t have a bloody clue either. I always assumed that a dog needs a pogo stick like a fish needs a bicycle, and this spin-off only proved my point.
Anyway, the gameplay is heavily based on [i]Q*bert[/i], which I have admittedly never tried, but I am reluctant to give it a shot after slogging through this title. The first thing that made me uneasy about this game were the controls: you move Pep by clicking on the tile nearest to him, which sounds simple enough, but the way that the ‘go’ arrow attaches to tiles feels less smooth than you may expect. Because these tiles are so close together, the difference of a single pixel can result in selecting another title; it is easy to misclick and send him to either the wrong tile or the void by accident, so keep a close eye on your cursor.
And yes, I said ‘the void’, that is to say, a spot where no tile exists, whereinto Pep can leap to an almost certain demise until Putt-Putt catches him. While the liberty to leap into nothingness is useful in maps where reappearing tiles exist, most of the time the possibility is merely an unnecessary worry in an already struggleful campaign.
The next issue are the foes. These creatures have no discernible pattern of movement, but most of them do look for one second in the direction that they are about to take, making their movement less unpredictable. The exceptions are the incredibly annoying brown hedgehogs that you encounter later in the campaign: these beasts can only look in two directions and the only time that they hesitate to move is during the brief period immediately after Putt-Putt sends Pep back to square one. There were several runs in level 95 where I simply could not progress because the hedgehogs kept cornering me.
This leads me to my next point: there are too many cheap ways to lose in this campaign. If you are just one microsecond too late with your jump, an enemy will pounce you in mid-air and then you’ll either go back to square one or get a game over, depending on how many second chances that you have left. Some of these losses are outright aleatory, too. A perfect example is level 62, which is filled with oiled tiles, random teleports, and one goat. If you are unlucky, the goat will teleport where Pep is. It is because of frustrations like these that most of the time, I did not even bother collecting all of the items; I went straight to the exit because I just wanted to finish the level. This may explain why I beat the campaign in a little under three hours even though there are over a hundred levels. It is a good thing that the only consequence of a game over is that your score resets, otherwise you can continue like normal.
This is not to say that the designers did everything wrong: as you advance, you almost consistently encounter new types of obstacles, enemies, or challenges to face, which keeps the gameplay from feeling too repetitive. Occasionally you can even grab a power-up that lets Pep eliminate his foes, and if you are crafty you can lead some of them to their demises, depending on the level. Certain areas, like level 93, only require you to think rather than also be flexible, but these are sadly rare.
For the most part, the sound is nothing special: many of the sound effects are what you would expect from a cartoon, but they’re only annoying in the jungle levels because most of their tiles are drums. Jason Ellefson once again delivered an average performance, though there was one line that I could not understand without the subtitles. The music is more remarkable: there are a few groovy tracks in here, but the others are merely competent. Although that is faint praise, I would still say that the music is [i]Dog on a Stick[/i]’s strong suit.
The graphics are unimpressive: the models have the same cartoony, low-detail aesthetic that we have seen elsewhere in this series. The animation isn’t great either: although you should know better than to anticipate animation quality on par with [i]The Thief and the Cobbler[/i] from Humongous Entertainment, in this case buttery smooth animations would have helped with the gameplay. The backgrounds you’d expect to fare the best visually, but since the tiles cover up so much of them, the difference is small. Above all, the biggest problem in the visuals is how it is sometimes unclear what is a tile and what is a gap, and determining whether Pep can reach a tile or not is trickier than it needed to be. My only advice is that you better get used to that diagonal perspective, ’cause it ain’t going anywhere.
In summary, I rarely enjoyed [i]Dog on a Stick[/i]. If you like the setting then I would recommend watching a longplay, but if you need to collect this anyway, get it as either part of either the Putt-Putt Complete Pack or the Humongous Entertainment Complete Pack when they go on sale, because as a standalone purchase this definitely isn’t worth the dosh.
