Oh...Sir! The Insult Simulator & The Hollywood Roast (Switch(reviewed), Steam, iOS, Android)
Developer: Vile Monarch
Publisher: Gambitious
Price: $1.99, $2.99
Mr. J. Shufflebottom was walking by the lake when he came across a dead body beneath a tree. Mrs. Maggie was standing next to it, and Mr. Shufflebottom immediately began questioning her as to why she murdered the man. She denied it, and he decided to get her to confess by wearing her down by hurling insults at her.
"Your wife has worse hair than you and goes around murdering people!"
"Your face probably murdered your husband!"
Meanwhile, in Hollywood, Dirty Potter confronted Jane Blunt in a casino for stealing his chips.
"Your last plastic surgery was ruined by your iconic costume and peruses manga, and I mean that in the nicest way!"
"Your red carpet dress will have to face a shorter version of Benedict Cumberbatch!"
These are very small examples of some of the scenarios you will encounter in Oh...Sir! The Insult Simulator and the follow up Oh...Sir! The Hollywood Roast, both now available on the Nintendo Switch.
The premise behind the games is that you face off against your opponent, taking turns building complete sentences by selecting sentence fragments from a limited pool of choices. After both players end their turn, the insults are hurled, scored, and damage is dealt. When your opponent's health runs out, you win!
The premise sounds simple, but there is depth hiding here. Besides strategically using certain sentence fragments, you can also build combos and attack your opponents insecurities for massive damage! You also have a few extra sentence fragments available to choose from that are only for you, and these can be randomly swapped out by drinking a cup of tea (Insult Simulator) or reading the script (Hollywood Roast). These can come in handy when your opponent takes a sentence fragment you might need.
You can play both titles online, with a friend locally, or if you don't have friends or a working internet connection, you can play by yourself against a CPU. If you play the CPU, you can play a single game or a series of scenes against multiple opponents. In Insult Simulator, this leads to a confrontation between you and "Father", where you try to learn the meaning of life.
Each game has a variety of characters (some unlockable), and they all have unique personalities, weaknesses, and full voice work. We get people like Dirty Potter (a mashup of Dirty Harry and Harry Potter), Bad Motherhugger (pretty much just Samuel L. Jackson), Lo Wang from Shadow Warrior, H.P. Lovecraft, and Serious Sam. Going by the unlock slots, there are a total of ten characters in the first game, and nine completely new characters in the second.
I really enjoy these two games, but I have one minor complaint about Hollywood Roast. When they made the second game, they added in a new mechanic called Comebacks, which is a meter that fills up over the course of a roast, and it gives your insults a little something extra when you use it. For some reason they mapped that to the same button on the controller as the cup of tea from the first game, and put reading the script on a different button. It doesn't ruin the game by any means, but I have pushed the wrong button a number of times and used a comeback when I didn't intend to.
Both titles are fun for a quick diversion regardless of whether you are playing with a friend, a stranger online, or the CPU. They are well worth their crazy low price tags!
These games were reviewed with copies supplied by Vile Monarch.