Chickens are funny. Nobody knows why, but whether they’re crossing roads to get to the other side or helping Guybrush Threepwood to reach Hook Isle, they have a permanent seat at the high table of comedy.

Slidesoft’s ChickenPOP! contains perhaps the funniest chicken action yet. This bizarre physics-based casual game sees you launching a ragdoll chicken from a cannon and then keeping it aloft with a series of magical bubbles.

You create the bubbles by tapping the screen. If the chicken lands squarely on a bubble it bounces in a neat vertical arc ready for the next bubble.

But if the chicken lands off-centre it does what any object does when it collides with a bouncy sphere off-centre: it shoots away at a crazy angle and plummets to its death.

Further complicating matters are various airborne obstacles, such as bees that unhelpfully pop your bubbles, drones that follow your chicken about and collide with it, and birds that sweep in from the side of the screen and send your chicken spiralling groundwards without warning.

And that’s just level one. In level two your chicken is tethered to the back of a rocket in space, dangling about in zero gravity as you use your finger to guide the rocket past meteors, satellites, and other space nasties.

And finally, in level three, you need to guide your chicken through the nightmare that is heaven, dodging arrows, bibles, and assorted other holy instruments of death.

It’s a simple enough idea, but ChickenPOP! isn’t quite like anything we’ve played before. Not only is it hilarious, but it’s a real test of skill. Only the best players will have the ability and patience to make it all the way through, so you can unlock all three levels with a small IAP (we did.)

You can also pay to unlock several more types of chicken to fling, and a version of the game without ads.

Think you can beat it without paying? Grab ChickenPOP! for free right now on Google Play and the App Store.