Oh Sir! The Hollywood Roast Review- A game of two halves

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Vile Monarch have been hard at work creating Oh Sir! The Hollywood Roast. Slightly concerned for my pride I decided to check out what it was all about. So I set my humiliation level to max and fired it up.

Gameplay

Oh Sir! The Hollywood Roast is a remodelling of ‘Oh Sir! The Insult Simulator’.  So how does it all work? Well first you choose your game mode, solo or 2 player, then you roast people. It’s so simple even an independent game developer could understand it (not my finest roast). The solo option has a career mode, and as we probably all know, some people have made careers out of roasting people. I have roasted a few games in the past, so hopefully Oh Sir! The Hollywood Roast will survive.

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Thankfully there is a tutorial. And you get a trophy for it.

Choose your player. Each player is a loosely disguised celebrity waiting to trash talk another loosely disguised celebrity. Choose wisely as each has their own special phrases. Take your position in the designated battleground and start hurling insults.

I decided to play a 2 player game, I convinced my 18yr old son that it would be fun, so he left the confines of his room/swamp and joined me in a couch game. One controller, 2 players, so don’t sit too far away from each other unless your controller is aerodynamic.

We selected our players and started the verbal joust. You are presented with a list of words and phrases that you can choose from to make a good insult. There is a time limit, so don’t overthink it. There are some classic starts, ‘Your mom’ was well used by both of us. You get the odd conjunction on its own to string together something more impressive. Sometimes you eye up the perfect phrase and your opponent steals one of your lines as both players pick from the same list. If its your 18yr old son and you are playing in couch mode, physical violence can ease frustration levels.

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Let’s not piss off Liam Neeson please. He knows where I live.

String top phrases together and score big. Your opponents pride gets smashed. You win and get bragging rights forever.

Is the game fun? Well we managed 3 games before the ‘yawn in hood’ crawled back to his room. This is a positive result. The game is most definitely fun in couch mode.

So how about single player mode?

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What no fetching apples for a crumble? No retrieving a familiy heirloom from a nearby dungeon? Wow! Something unique for a change.

In single player mode Oh Sir! The Hollywood Roast wilts like a rose in the desert. It has all the charm of a colostomy bag in a swimming pool. Without the other player being a real person it is just stringing words together. This game needs that human interaction to perform at its best. There is a reason why ‘Cards Against Humanity’ doesn’t have a single player mode! The artificial intelligence is like a Neanderthal using a computer for the first time. “Me click here?”, “Me clever”, “Your Mom thinks Meryl Streep is overrated”. I genuinely felt bad seeing such a good experience dry up and turn into drudgery. Such promise cut down so early. Having said that, you don’t have to play in single player mode so it’s not all bad. Each single player round has goals to achieve and they get harder (it’s all relative) as you go through them. Unlock new characters with impressive victories.

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Is that the best you have got?

Graphics

Oh Sir! The Hollywood Roast is interestingly visually arranged. The characters are recognisable. The backgrounds look like a good 80s graphical adventure. I’m sorry, I have to return to the characters. WTF is going on with them? They appear to all be sponsored by Toblerone, I have never seen so many triangles in my life.  Is this a style? Someone please make it stop. Not quite Picasso, not quite Monet, nothing like Di Vinci. This is what happens when mathematicians do art. It sucks. Did I miss something? The part that blew my mind completely was the smooth bendy arms coming out of the harsh geometric bodies. With all the thoughts going round my head I nearly timed out my first move. Why does Gandalf (The Greasy Wizard) flash so much? I don’t want to be seeing his pink Y fronts. No one wants to be seeing his pink Y fronts. (Sorry about the earlier screenshot, and the next one) One thing I want everyone to do is when they next go outside, take a look at everyone’s noses and see if they are all much redder than the rest of the face. The only part that wasn’t made out of total triangles and the colours are all messed up.

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Sorry about the flashing again. My bad.

Fortunately the graphics are not a key part of this game.

Audio

In Oh Sir! The Hollywood Roast we get to know what it would be like to hear the bastard son of Steven Hawkins and lost tourist with a translation dictionary. The speech is generic, and sounds like an auto cue is having issues getting the words to the actors in time. The audio should have been the key component to this game and for me it could have been a lot better.

Longevity

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I see a little hobbit, and some pink Y fronts again.

Oh Sir! The Hollywood Roast is ultimately a good game or a bad game depending on the circumstance in which you play it. Twister with friends is fun, but on your own it is just not the same, in fact it might get you taken away. Oh Sir! The Hollywood Roast is the same. The limited selection of phrases will get tiresome after a while, the amusing isn’t the same the second time round. It’s light entertainment as opposed to fun. If you are having a night in with a few drinks and the girls/guys round it will be a fun addition to the evenings entertainment, and the price is about the same as a pint down my local, so why not?

Vile Monarch had an excellent idea that I think has not quite managed to reach expectation levels. I am looking forward to the craziness and uniqueness that I am sure will be behind their next project though.

Oh Sir! The Hollywood Roast insulted its way to a Thumb Culture Bronze Award

(on a couch with a beer and some mates and Oh Sir! The Hollywood Roast makes a silver award)

 

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