Shaun Munro reviews Oh…Sir!! The Insult Simulator…
Amid the sea of AAA titles vying for your cash, Vile Monarch’s fiercely unique Oh…Sir!! The Insult Simulator is nothing if not a breath of fresh air. Having sold more than 250,000 copies on PC and mobile platforms since its release late last year, it now finally arrives on PS4 and Xbox One, and delivers a gleefully, dementedly weird puzzle game experience quite like nothing else out there.
The Insult Simulator sees the player taking part in 1v1 insult matches, turn-based battles of pride and wit where player and opponent pick sentence strings from a central pool of phrases and conjunctions in order to construct the most devastating insult. Each insult will chip away at a health bar, beat ’em up style, until only one remains.
With a distinctly Monty Python-esque tone from the outset, the game amusingly sends-up old-fashioned Britishness by allowing players to pick from a cast of ten prim-and-proper Brit stereotypes, before they’re hurled into bizarre scenarios such as explaining the presence of a corpse, and in the game’s most blatant Python nod, arguing over a dead parrot.
Most of the game’s fun comes from contriving the most absurdly over-the-top insult possible, and in that sense the game proves highly reminiscent of the magnificent Cards Against Humanity, albeit without the same crudeness. Here, insults range from “your mother doesn’t even own a colour TV” to, in what was my personal favourite, “your father actually enjoyed Batman v Superman“.
Despite its overall simplicity, there is a pleasant amount of strategy to scoring a victory; if you don’t think a few moves ahead, you can quickly end up without a suitable phrase at your disposal, which will require you to “take a sip of tea” in order to re-roll speech options from a small private hand (which can only be done once per round), select the ellipsis option and hold your insult over for the next round, or end up losing a few points for your poor grammar.
On the other hand, extra points are awarded for exploiting a character’s personal weakness (for example, their family), and if you manage to return to the same insult in successive rounds, you can score a point-rich combo. Players have just 15 seconds to pick a speech option, ensuring the pace remains snappy and even surprisingly tense at times, especially if your opponent has just stolen away the turn of phrase you were intending to use.
Committed to delivering the basic goods, the game doesn’t come with anything approaching a campaign, but players can take on the CPU in a five-match tournament in order to unlock the game’s remainder of characters. There’s little remarkable about it compared to simply playing a random 1v1 bout, but it’s a commendable act of mercy that losing later on in the tournament doesn’t send you all the way back to the beginning; you’re able to retry as much as you like.
In addition, to this, there’s a substantial multiplayer component, where players can battle online with a pal or a stranger, and even the unexpected presence of couch co-op. It’s a little disappointing that you require two controllers to play this mode, because it feels quite well-suited to pass-the-controller play, but perhaps this was intended to keep the pace as lightning-fast as possible. Smartly, the online suite supports cross-play with other platforms, though online functionality wasn’t working prior to the embargo lifting, so we can’t yet comment on it.
Though the game largely does a bang-up job of knowing its limitations and serving up quirky laughs accordingly, it’s fair to say that, like Cards Against Humanity, it can feel repetitive fast thanks to a small word set, and the game could certainly use a larger phrase pool in order to sustain over time. It’d also be nifty if players could add their own words, though that may wreak havoc with the game’s occasionally frustrating and obtuse scoring system.
Though for the most part the scoring algorithm accurately aligns with player intent, it can be annoying if it misinterprets a pithy assertion and doesn’t reward you accordingly, but such is the nature of humour.
Still, by and large, Oh…Sir!! The Insult Simulator is one of the year’s most beguilingly unique games, offering up a totally different experience to just about anything else out there right now, and more often than not succeeding in its modest goals. Making the most of its agreeable 8-bit visuals and amusingly over-the-top voice acting, it’s a budget title that nevertheless feels sharp and tight, and with a mere 310MB file size, you can have it downloaded in seconds.
Pros:
+ Totally unique and well-executed concept
+ Well-realised retro visuals
+ Amusing voice acting
Cons:
– Speech options get repetitive quite quickly
– Scoring system may occasionally frustrate
Rating: 7/10
Reviewed for PS4 (also available on PC, Xbox One and mobile platforms)
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more video game rambling.
