What The Dub?! is a simple but funny party game that places public domain TV and movie clips before you to dub over with funny comments. In a similar vein to Jackbox and a copy of Use Your Words, its narrow focus and lack of streamer support options hold it back a little. If you have like-minded friends though, it is still a good laugh in short spells.
Over 300 clips are available to dub. They are typically very short at ten seconds maximum but you can type out a full sentence to fill in the gaps. You do this by entering a room code on a website from your mobile, tablet or PC. If you have a web browser, it will work. Connectivity was perfect during my few goes playing. You can choose how many rounds you want to play, extend the timers (handy for streaming as there is a delay) and turn on or off a bad word filter. Off clearly! Each round you see the clip, submit your dub and then vote on your favourites. You are scored on how many votes you get and after the final round, the winner is declared. When typing your dub in, it is robo-voiced back into the clip in one of the best speech recognition tools I’ve seen in a game. You can also add sound effects from a small list too for extra boing.
Between the often hiss filled and bad quality ancient film clips (not a dig, it’s part of the charm), What The Dub?! is very low frills. The same two-chord piece of music from old cinema times plays and gets old fast and we quickly found that during streaming, the advertised 12 player limit is not actually true. 6 players can actively play the game and another 6 can join in the audience and purely vote. That was a disappointment as, during my stream of the game, we hit both limits and had people still trying to join. I get perhaps why the 6 player limit is there but the audience limit does feel rather low for any big streamers to get everyone involved.
I’ve played the game on three separate occasions, totalling just over four hours. I have started to see a couple of repeats of clips already but never in the same playing session which is nice. I’ve also noticed that some clips come from the same film and when players pick that up, we found it extra fun to reference our previous dubs and create an even stupider story. The game does lack the ability for someone who leaves the game to be booted out. You also cannot get back into a game when you’ve been disconnected briefly too. This can lead to you waiting for the timer to count down with that same two-chord track droning on. These are key quality of life features that I’d like to see added.
I do feel I have to mention that use Your Words has this game mode as part of three mini-games – although it is the best part of that game. What The Dub?! does it better though as it uses speech recognition, a longer character limit and sound effects.
Overall, What The Dub?! is a decent game. Well priced and without technical issues, everyone I’ve played it with has enjoyed themselves. Best played in a short burst for say 30 minutes before moving onto some other mini-games to keep things fresh, this should be part of your party game rotation.
Below is a NSFW livestream with lots of sex and political jokes. You have been warned.
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