Atmospug, the Cloud Jumping Dog

From the perspective of someone who is pretty indifferent to dogs, the pug seems to be a kind of mish-mash of ugly and unremarkable genetic components that somehow combine to form a cute breed.

Atmospug, the Cloud Jumping Dog also throws together a mish-mash of ugly and unremarkable elements, but they combine to form an unloved mongrel of a game.

Atmospug somehow contrives to be simultaneously over-simplistic and confusing, shallow and frustrating.

It's all about tapping one of two buttons (and occasionally both) to hop your little pug from cloud to cloud. The right-hand button initiates a long and low forward hop, while the left-hand button executes a high and short hop. Hit both together and your pug will hop backwards.

That's it for controls, but it's amazing how awkward three basic commands can be to initiate at times.

Perhaps it's the counter-intuitive nature of their design and layout. Under pressure from rapidly disappearing clouds and other obstructions, it's all too easy to hit the wrong key - the one it instinctively feels like it ought to be.

Or perhaps it's the clunky, stilted, and unpredictable movement of your pug and its glitchy relationship with those floating clouds.

There's no feeling of weight, no tactile sense of where each jump will land you, and it's not helped by some unforgiving collision detection.

Levels descend into repetitive trial-and error runs as you seek to uncover the sequence of taps that will allow you to reach the dog kennel at the end of the level. It's quite tedious.

So too is the game's baffling, poorly explained 'build your own level' structure, which sees you dragging and dropping new level elements into sequence. You're then forced to play through the previous stages again to get to the new section.

You can spend virtual currency to change your current level options, or to scrap a difficult section, but that just seems like a concession that much of Atmospug, the Cloud Jumping Dog is a boring, frustrating trudge.

It's a real dog of a game, alright.