Firstly, I want to call attention to the fact that the store page LIES? It says, 'Over 100 levels of hound-hopping fun'. This is a lie. There are ONLY 100 levels in this game. I know because I just beat this stupid thing. I got to level 100, Putt-Putt announced it was 'level 100, wowie zowie' and then I beat it, and the game ends with an inexplicable cutscene that has nothing to do with anything that happens in the game.
Anyway, so this game, Putt-Putt® and Pep's Dog on a Stick, is one of the worst games I have ever played. Again! I come to you now fresh off Putt-Putt® and Pep's Balloon-o-Rama, which was also one of the worst games I have ever played.
This game, however, is much worse.
So the basic gameplay is just, unbelievably, Q*bert. It's Q*bert! You get put on a bunch of floating cubes in space basically, with an isometric camera, and you use the MOUSE to aim where you want to go, and you just click where you want to go, to hop around on these cubes. Wow. I was honestly stunned beyond belief when I saw that this is what they had come up with, but to actually play it is another thing entirely. I'm basically done talking about the gameplay because that's it, it's just awful.
What makes this the worst game ever is that there are enemies in it, sometimes TONS of enemies. There's pretty few enemy types, because many are just the same sort of deal, which is 'guy that hops between platforms like you' and a few of them have an extra gimmick, like pigs can fly (ha ha ha) so they ignore all tiles and just fly on empty space if they want, skunks leave behind bad smells that I guess probably kill you if you touch them, but all enemies instantly take a life on contact.
Oh yeah that is worth mentioning by the way. You die in ONE HIT. You get 3 lives, if you lose all of them you are booted back to the level select. That might sound like not the strictest thing but it makes actually finishing some stages a genuine pain. Most stages in fact, are a pain. I managed to breeze through this game in the span of 2 hours apparently, and let me tell you I was engaged during it, but it was the worst kind of engagement where I was angry the whole time because every stage is a test of your patience.
You might think looking at this game, and with the history of other Humongous games, that it's probably some sort of puzzle game and WRONG, SO WRONG. For some reason like 95 out of 100 of these stages are ALL action stages, very very few stages in this game actually rely on you to solve some kind of a puzzle, they tried to integrate 'puzzle elements' into some of the later action stages when the game was meant to get 'challenging' by just having buttons that reveal where the exit is (usually on the opposite side of the stage as far away from you as possible) but because enemy movement is random, sometimes you can just let the enemy do that for you.
Oh, and yes enemy movement and what they choose to do is random. This means sometimes you sit there and enemies just literally don't do anything to you, and some other times they will pretty much instantly beeline straight for you and sit on you until you lose all your lives. There are occasions too, because these levels are INCREDIBLY cramped, all of them, that enemies will actually either camp out on a path you have to take, or on top of the goal, or just AROUND it, or a button you want to press - by the way, enemies can press buttons, which is just great because this could do anything from killing you, to killing another different enemy, to just wasting your time because they turned off the goal tile and it's just gone now so you either have to go all the way back there to press it OR you wait for them to do it again for you!
Some enemies by the way, like the frogs, just don't even play by the same rules. Frogs can hop up to 2 spaces at a time which is just great, because sometimes you might think you're safe then they just leap somewhere you really didn't want them to be and you're in trouble all of a sudden, and there's NOTHING you can do about it. There's also the porcupines. I don't know if they are actually porcupines, but there's literal human-like bears in this game so I can't really call them bears. They, unlike other enemies, ALWAYS are hopping from tile to tile. Most enemies sit there on the tile for a moment just to think, which gives you time to get past. Porcupines, JUST. GO. They ALWAYS are moving from one tile to another, which makes them the most random and thus dangerous enemies in the game.
Which should be addressed - you get to be pretty much the weakest character ever in this game, which is just a great thing all children want to deal with. You die in one hit to everything, and there's no powerups in this game that I could find, except the hot chocolate, which just lets you move slightly faster - which in my opinion should have just been the default speed. You can also get the cape which turns you I guess into a very powerful dog that beats all enemies. However, you can still die if you fall off a ledge, and if you fall off a ledge you instantly lose your powerups and they DO NOT respawn unless you quit out and start the stage over.
Additionally, I don't know if they work on a timer or what, I never stuck around to see a powerup expire, but you can't carry powerups between stages in this game, unlike Balloon-o-Rama. This probably helps for the curated specially made levels in this game, for the sake of balance, but it's a hell of a lot less fun. This game also almost never actually puts powerups in levels, and, if they are even IN a level, you might have to go VERY far out of your way to even get it, to the point it's just not worth it! There's maybe one or two levels in the entire game where you NEED a powerup to progress and it is provided to you.
They seemingly had absolutely no ideas for this stupid game, because they only came up with like 4 different types of blocks, one kicks you to the next tile in the direction you are facing (oil slicks), one catapults you two tiles ahead which describes either the trampolines or the weird magic star platforms that force you to jump 2 tiles at a time for 3 turns, another is the portals that teleport you to another portal somewhere on the map, and then there's the kaizo blocks.
The trampolines and 'weird magic star platforms' are pretty self-explanatory. However, the others are worthy of mentioning for how bad they are.
Portals are random. Except one or two stages where they are not random. There's then again one or two stages where they are fixed, and you'll never really know which it is until you've gone through a couple. Portals take you to another portal somewhere else. They are just awful. I hated dealing with them. I don't know what else to say, except either you should never have random portals in your game if you really have to do this, it was a big problem in Sock Works where chutes randomly sent socks around the map and at a random output and it's a problem here too.
This game also has kaizo blocks, and while for the most part they aren't too evil, they're just a vanishing block that you jump on that then reappears somewhere else, and you usually just need to hop across one, stage 98 deserves special mention for being a stage that is ALL kaizo blocks. I literally could not believe what I was seeing.
You straight up have to do a Megaman style 'hop across all these vanishing platforms, jumping as it disappears onto the new platform appearing now beneath your feet' and do it perfectly all the way through, or you go all the way back to the beginning of the stage because you fell in the pit. It's unbelievably cruel. It is well past the point where this game completely gave up on being a children's game fortunately, so at that point I pretty much was prepared for it, but I was still just awestruck. stage and have to start over.
So yeah this game is a total bomb. The bonus stage sucks too. Would not recommend! To ANYONE! DON'T PLAY THIS JUNK!
