Dog Man: Mission Impawsible fully captures the energy and character of the comics

I’ve been playing platforming games for most of my life and my daughter Robin loves Dav Pilkey’s Dog Man comic series. So, what could go wrong with the two of us giving Dog Man: Mission Impawsible a shot? As it turns out, not much.

Dog Man: Mission Impawsible looks like a pretty barebones platformer when you first take a look at it. A large part of that is down to it mimicking the style of the comic book series — which it, according to my eight year-old expert, does a great job of. It, however, isn’t as simple as it seems because each of the three protagonists can be switched through, and they each have fundamental differences.

Dog Man, Li’l Petey and 80-HD (as well as their Supa Buddies identities: The Bark Knight, Cat Kid & Lightning Dude) are each a different size and weight, but, additionally, they can also jump different distances. Dog Man is the default: Medium height, medium weight and capable of a medium-length jump. He’ll squeeze through most spaces, and have about a second before most collapsing blocks give way under his weight, while 80-HD will instantly collapse those rocks and Li’L Petey won’t affect them at all. The thing is, Li’l Petey can’t jump particularly far.

That means, especially in the first world which features the collapsing blocks from a couple of levels in, you’ll need to learn how to switch between characters quickly so that you can do it mid-jump. We played through it on Xbox, where the X button rotated one way and the Y button another. It wasn’t an ideal system, as it required you to remember the order of the characters (or refer to the top left corner of the UI) which was tricky mid-jump. My daughter had me finish a few levels, however took the controller back off me later and was very keen to point out which of the comics each of the enemies and characters were from.

With that said, it takes a while for Dog Man: Mission Impawsible to open up. By the time you’ve got in the habit of switching between the characters you’ll start unlocking the extra abilities of each of the characters: by the end of the second world Dog Man can dig through mud, Li’L Petey can climb soft walls with Wolverine-esque claws and 80-HD can push and pull large boxes. After that comes hang-gliders, grappling hooks and more. Once these features start unlocking more regularly everything starts meshes really well and the ‘puzzle’ element of it becomes more about timing than swapping form mid-jump.

For a licensed game it’s particularly well-made, and it’s clear that a lot of care was given to not straying from the source material. In fact, all of the enemies and bosses are enemies from the comics, brought back to life by a fantastic McGuffin. That said, you might have to help out younger players — but considering this is one of the highest quality — free of obvious bugs and glitches — ‘kids games’ from a smaller publisher that I’ve played in a while, it’ll be worth it.

For fans of the comics, Dog Man: Mission Impawsible is an obvious gift.

Dog Man: Mission Impawsible is available now for Windows PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, PS5 and Nintendo Switch.