Review: What the Dub?! – PS5, PS4

We’ve got a cracker of a review for you with the latest game from Wide Right Interactive and it’s What The Dub?! – a new party game. I will warn you in advance, there is a lot of bad language in the video below because the people I played the game with are all potty mouths. And, well, yeah, so am I. So be prepared for foul language and some really off-colour jokes… You have been warned.

Do you ever sit and watch a movie or TV show and pause it to inject your own jokes? I do and it drives my partner nuts. She hates it. I do it among friends, too, and they hate it. Why? Because my jokes are unfunny? No. I’m hilarious. That can’t be it. Why do they hate it then? Because the point of a movie or TV show is to sit in silence, watch the actors act, get brainwashed by the product placement and commercial breaks, and then go and buy stuff you don’t need. It’s not a place to make jokes. But what if it was…

What The Dub? is a party game where players sit around and watch clips of old movies and then dub over the blanked audio with the best line they can think of. Then, when everybody has submitted their lines via the game’s website, the clip plays back with everybody’s lines being spoken by a text-to-speech program. It’s simple but it works really well – and that goes for the entire package.
The setup is this: You start a game and you get a room code. You then go to playwtd.com and enter your name and the room code, as do your mates, whether they’re sitting next to you or a thousand miles away. If you’re playing with others remotely, you’ll use the share feature on PS4/PS5. This functionality wasn’t available pre-release but we worked around this with a group video call and my tablet computer pointing at the TV. Imperfect, but it worked and we still had a good laugh.

You play the game entirely from within the game’s website – this is where the box appears that you need to write your contending dub. The clip will play on the TV, you’ll have a set amount of time to come up with something funny, and then it’s time to see what everyone came up with.
With me and my group of friends, the jokes were always going to be rude, disgusting, vulgar, and sometimes just plain wrong. As a group, you’ll decide the winner of the round by voting for your favourite dub. Points are awarded at the end of each round and the player with the most points at the end of five rounds (the game’s default) wins; you can increase the game length up to 10 rounds maximum, and there are also options to increase the time allowed for entering dubs, as well as the naughty word filter. I was not allowed to test this feature because, well, my friends are scum and so am I. Naughty words or nothing!

Even with a few people playing at the same time, the game still moved along really quickly and kept up the party-game pace, mostly. We did have a few unfortunate moments where the game either lagged behind and didn’t show the clip, or just stopped working altogether, forcing a restart of the game. These were few and far between and if I’m being honest, they helped me a few times by getting me out of a game I had no chance of winning. Still, I’d have liked it if they didn’t happen, but they don’t occur too often so as to ruin the game experience.
What really makes the game is the collection of clips. According to the developer, there are over 300 clips, and to be fair, I’ve only come across a handful of instances where I’ve seen a familiar clip while playing. There’s everything from an old sci-fi movie, old-school American PSAs, and even a black-and-white Sherlock Holmes movie. Taking these B-movies and giving them a second life with some rude dubs is good silly fun and I can’t recommend it enough.

In the evenings where we couldn’t get anybody to join us, myself and the lady would play against each other with the tablet computer acting as a third player. We didn’t play for points – just for the silly fun of surprising each other with what we can get the game to say. So bear that in mind – you do need at least three players to play the game properly.
My complaints are few and my praises are many when it comes to What The Dub? as a party game. It’s sure to be a blast playing with friends and family in the same room – something I can’t currently try because 2021 is the unfortunate sequel to 2020, but it’s still good fun playing with friends and family thousands of miles away. Plus, it lets me say things to my partner’s mother that I could never get away with in real life…