In my line of acting work, I’ve been insulted more than the average person. I have been abused online, shouted at in chat rooms and of course on stage, sometimes you get a heckle. You learn when to shout back and when to respond to a heckle without causing more trouble or a massive fight. Now in Oh…Sir! The Hollywood Roast you get to experience what it’s like to be verbally abused, before learning to perfect the smartest retort or comeback. But will you survive this rhetorical insult and live to fight another round?
Oh…Sir! The Hollywood Roast is a spinoff/sequel to the highly successful Oh…Sir! The Insult Simulator. This time around this simple enough premise of a game heads to the movie world and embraces all things La La Land.
The rules are as easy as a Hollywood facelift, whereby you pick from a range of mad characters – like Dirty Harry, who is a mix of Clint Eastwood and Harry potter, a Gandalf clone, Jane Blunt the female James Bond, a Deadpool inspired wisecracker and more – to play with. The idea is that you face an enemy in 2D Street Fighter style, with life bars hanging over your head, before the verbal fight begins.
The aim of the game is to get points off your opponent’s health bar by giving them the best insults you can. You select from an array of words, statements or half sentences in order to string an insult together to damage your opponent. For example, you might have YOUR and LAST MOVIE as the first insult, then WAS A CARBON COPY and finally OF A FAT CHRIS PRATT. Not my best I know, but it is effective enough. You will then get a number of points for the words used and how long the sentence is. The problem is that the other person can choose from the same list of insults and you might only be left with an incomplete insult that will result in incorrect grammar and a score of zero.
You can have a lot of fun stringing together absolutely crazy combinations of sentence insults that might not make a lot of sense, but will still earn you some points. You can use the same starting points like YOUR MUM a few times in a round that will gain combos and double your score. Or you can try to work out your enemies weaknesses, for example, an ageing movie stars weakness is anything about her looks or age, so if you insult her on that subject you get another big bonus. You also have a power bar – the Comeback Meter – which fills up and can add a little extra zing to the insult related to the character.
At the end of a round if you both get killed at the same time then there is a sudden death round that happens. The winner gets points and golden parrot statues depending on how many tasks they have completed on the way. In the career mode, each character has 5 co-stars to defeat on their journey and the more experience they get, the more insults they have in their repertoire. But how good is The Hollywood Roast to actually play?
Well, this is a great game to have a go at with a friend (there is a two player mode as well) after a few drinks late at night. The word generator works well enough and the combination of insults is good fun, to begin with… but the joke does start to run thin after just a short while and there isn’t enough gameplay here to keep the interest going for a long time, and there definitely isn’t enough variation in the insults. Sometimes the points system doesn’t make as much sense as it needs to either and that ensures that The Hollywood Roast can feel a bit random at times. If you want an instant laugh it’s good for a chortle though.
Visually and playing through things is like watching a good, slightly moving, satirical cartoon. The characters are well drawn, even though they are very low key and low budget. The sound is good as well, without being spectacular and the voiceover work is decent with the actors really having fun with the over the top characters.
There is a lot to like in this small little indie game and Oh…Sir! The Hollywood Roast has a bit of a charm to it, mostly thanks to its originality. The gameplay doesn’t really increase its value after the first five attempts and you might tire of this pretty damn quickly, but it’s a good one to bring out at a party with a few friends around. The price justifies this as well with it being very cheap, cheaper then a drink in my parts, so it might be worth a punt even if you play for just an hour.
