Developer: Mark Zorn, Kurt Wojda, Wide Right Interactive
Publisher: Wide Right Interactive
Platform: PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5, Switch
Tested on: Switch
What The Dub?! – Review
Even in our ever-growing politically correct society, games such as Cards Against Humanity, and its many derivatives reign supreme in the party-game market. We have seen card games mimic the aforementioned game’s gameplay, as well as an actual hybrid card and board game that was made based on the same principles which we reviewed a while ago. This time, we arrive at What The Dub?! which shows you small clips of different movies where some of the voice tracks have been removed. It’s up to you, and your friends, to fill in the blanks and hear a horrible dub of those suggestions. While the game is quite basic, we were actually quite entertained.
Story
As expected, the game has no story value whatsoever. During your ‘matches’ the game shows you very short (unknown) movie clips that have some of the voices missing. You may recognize one or two, but overall there is nothing in terms of story.
Graphics
As the game uses dated movie material, the image quality is not always the sharpest. Nonetheless, this greatly adds to that cheesy B-movie cinema feel, which goes hand in hand with the absurd answers you and your fellow players will certainly suggest for the scenes that are shown during the rounds. We did enjoy the material, and the menus were also quite clear. The latter had all the basics, and this suffices for a game such as this.
Sound
While the repeating menu music may make you want to stab someone in the face repeatedly after listening to it loop every twenty seconds, the sound quality of the movie clips is superb. Again, this gave an authentic quality to the game, and we hope that in future updates even more footage or content is added to this library.
The dub that is generated for the missing audio fragment, is okayish at best. The game does a commendable effort in having a somewhat realistic voice do the dubbing, but it can of course only pronounce English words, and when typing in ‘all caps’, it will spell out the letters. Typing answers in your native language may also end causing fairly hilarious situations.
Gameplay
As described in the introduction and story portions of this review, What The Dub?! is a party game that adheres to the same principles as Cards Against Humanity. In this scenario, you will have to fill in the blanks for a few movie scenes. You do this via connecting to your unique game room, via smartphone or PC. This means you’ll have the Switch version on TV, while needing an extra device for input.
In the above already lies the first problem. Not everyone is able to share the screen of their Switch online via proper capture software. If you have a great webcam, you can host a Discord party in such a fashion, but this may be a bit clumsy at times. Nonetheless, this means you’ll have to be connected to the internet at all times, and as this is a three-player-minimum game, you’ll need people to play the game. Of course, a party game always needs people, but with a lot of lockdowns still in effect, you might not always get a proper crowd together (physically).
If you can cross the aforementioned hurdle, you’re in for a lot of fun. Of course, you’ll have to know your friends, as some may deem a few answers a bit too far or insensitive. Then again, there lies the charm of this small title, as you can do pretty much what you want. The movie scenes lend themselves to many different answers and situations and, except for some standard replies from certain friends, you will not see who answered what. After each round you vote for the best ‘dub’ and then eventually a winner gets picked. That’s basically all there is to the game. Is this a bad thing? Not at all actually.
There’s a small annoying bug with the ‘screensaver’ kicking in during gameplay when you don’t use your controller. The latter is actually logical, as you need your PC or smartphone to play the game, and the controller only serves for menu choices.
Conclusion
What The Dub?! may not be the best game that relies on the Cards Against Humanity principle, it does lend itself to be a very interesting and funny party game. While screen sharing or streaming with the Switch version is a bit harder, especially with local play being difficult in some parts of the world with the ongoing pandemic, it is quite nice to be able to bring this humorous game to friends thanks to the Switch’s portability. We did enjoy this one as a breather in-between heavier and more serious games.
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