Oh...Sir! The Hollywood Roast

I came into this one expecting nothing and got about exactly that from solo play, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about where the value actually lives. The Hollywood Roast is a follow-up to Vile Monarch's 2016 insult-'em-up, and the core loop is simple: two players take turns picking sentence fragments from a shared pool to assemble the most damaging roast they can, with a pride meter standing in for a health bar. Think of it as a 2D fighter where the attacks are grammatically questionable burns and the roster is a parade of legally-distinct Hollywood caricatures, among them Dirty Potter (yes, Dirty Harry crossed with Harry Potter), Bad Motherhugger, Marilyn Nomore, and the Greasy Wizard. The character-specific private phrase banks are a nice touch, giving each fighter a flavor that bleeds into the insults you can build. The mechanics have more texture than the premise suggests. Each character carries exploitable weaknesses, so targeting an opponent's sore spots multiplies your damage output. Combos reward you for repeating fragments across consecutive sentences. There is a 14-second timer on each pick, which adds just enough pressure to make you fumble a perfectly good sentence ending. And the Comeback meter, a character-specific super move that charges as you take damage, can bail out a weak insult or close a round with a finishing burn. On paper, that is a surprisingly coherent system for a game about trading Hollywood gossip. In practice, though, the ceiling is low and you hit it fast. The AI is barely a speed bump, the insult writing ranges from sharp to aggressively stale, and the phrase pool repeats itself so visibly that the novelty runs dry inside a single career run. The online population on PC has been a ghost town for years, so cross-platform or not, do not buy this expecting competitive queues. The Steam Workshop character creation mode is a fun idea that partially extends the lifespan if you are willing to dig into it, but it is not a substitute for a healthy player base. Where the game does work is local multiplayer. Shove a second person onto the couch, hand them a controller, and the whole enterprise clicks into something genuinely funny for thirty to sixty minutes. The voice acting is uneven but occasionally lands, and the caricature art style, while aggressively angular and divisive, at least commits to a bit. The career mode earns Golden Parrots for completing scene objectives with each character, which gates a handful of unlockables and gives solo players a reason to stick around past the first hour, though barely. Bottom line for the PC audience specifically: this is a party game that requires a party. The framework is clever, the execution is thin, and the online infrastructure is effectively dead. If you have a regular couch co-op night and want something absurd to fill twenty minutes between sessions of something meatier, it can earn its place. Going in solo expecting depth or longevity, you will bounce off it inside an afternoon.

Fred · Scout Team

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