Review: Use Your Words

Like browsing the net with your friends, only with less porn

Listen up fam, if you’re into making dank memes and have a few equally ‘lulz’ friends who want to create them sitting around a TV via their cell phones, then this is the game for you. I guess?

In a world that practically speaks, eats, and breathes in memes to the point that cartoon frogs are considered a symbol of antisemitism, charging money for a party game that equates to creating memes was not a great idea; it was a bad one, in fact. 

Use your Words (PC [reviewed], PS4, Xbox One, Wii U)
Developer: Smiling Buddha Games
Publisher: Screenwave Media
Released: April 4, 2017 / TBA Wii U
MSRP: $14.99

First, let me say I’ve played and enjoyed most of the Jackbox Party Pack titles. Sure, plenty of them are simple, but many have enough going for them that my friends and I want to go back to these games whenever we have a get-together. I can honestly say I don’t feel that way about Use Your Words. 

Use Your Words works much like the Jackbox games in that players must use a secondary device (typically a phone) to open a web browser and connect to the servers to play along with the game on whatever television, monitor, or live stream they’re in front of.

The game then presents either non-English clips where you must fill in the subtitles for a section, comical pictures to provide newspaper headlines, fill-in-the-blank questions (many of which are pop-culture references), and a lightning round that is straight up the lightning round from Family Feud, only three questions long. Players must type their responses into their phones and then vote on their favorite at the end of each round. Get your answers picked the most and you win, unless of course you pick house answers that deduct points from your total.

And that is it. While it’s an alright distraction, the same thing could be achieved by sitting at a computer and browsing Google images or YouTubing foreign films and quipping on them.

I suppose Use Your Words takes the work out of the process for you and tallies a score at least but… oh Mylanta, I just described reddit! In all seriousness, the whole game is just too shallow to be recommendable. On top of that, the amount of time it takes to cycle through answers after each prompt feels a bit longer than would be ideal.

In a world where $25 gets you five diverse party games in each of the Jackbox Party Pack collections, asking $15 for one flimsy game is just offensive.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}