Game Reviews

Prose With Bros

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Prose With Bros
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You'll probably find it hard to believe, but I've got something of a dirty sense of humour.

It's certainly common knowledge around PG Towers, where all double entendres are strictly banned, and if there's even a hint I've been near my Carry On boxset, I'm banished from office chat for a fortnight.

They'll rue the day they slapped Pros With Bros on my digital desk, however, given it's a game that could have easily been lifted straight out of the depths of my own mind. That's because not only is it a little bit rude, but it's also a bit rubbish.

Child's play

The concept is one you can imagine your average snotty-nosed kid sprouting while causing mischief on the school playground.

Picking from a selection of words chosen at random, the idea is to construct the most bizarre and frankly fruity sentence you can muster, either taking on a close-at-hand friend, or the scores of players online.

Thankfully, the controls don't attempt to confuse the issue: picking the words themselves is a simple case of dragging them up to the top of the screen with your finger, where you can then order them into some form of prose.

As well as arranging the words as you see fit, it's possible to leave spaces between them for emphasis – a factor that only really comes into play when your pervy poem is brought to life by the game's handy American voiceover.

Talking dirty

It's here that Prose With Bros comes into its own, albeit only briefly. Whatever your standing, there's no denying that hearing someone – whether real or virtual – read out an ensemble of daft words has a certain appeal.

Indeed, on first play, Prose With Bros is undoubtedly funny. The words at hand are deliberately chosen to deliver the most ridiculous of sentences, with the likes of 'squeezing', 'cream', and 'lederhosen' popping up at regular intervals.

However, it's the very random and verging-on-explicit nature of the words on offer that, eventually, nullifies their impact a few rounds in.

It's often impossible to string together anything that resembles a sound sentence, which results in a load of jumbled gook that's neither coherent nor especially amusing.

Bros that lose

Mirroring the problems that mire such sentences, the game itself has structural problems that makes playing it a mess.

The main idea is to challenge folk online, with the prose you both concoct put to the vote over a 24-hour period.

Indeed, you yourself can cast a vote on other attempts while you wait – Prose With Bros relies on its community to keep its model functioning, with players passing judgment on battles between strangers while their own contests hang in the balance.

But, as simple as that all sounds, Prose With Bros's engine clearly can't cope. Whether by choice, or as a result of a fault, players repeatedly drop out of contests, leaving you hanging.

There's no way to remove these battles from play, either, meaning your lineup of challenges is constantly dogged by non-existent games.

The game's live updates – intended to keep you up-to-date with the percentage of votes each sentence has amassed at a glance – don't always appear to refresh properly, frequently displaying 0% each way, when a tap on the battle in question shows exactly where the balance of power lies.

While such glitches certainly undermine play, it's the short-lived nature of the game's appeal that really puts pay to Prose With Bros, resulting in a title that's littered with gaffs, and has a sense of humour that ultimately proves to be more of a dirge than dirty.

Prose With Bros

An interest concept, Prose With Bros's attempt to serve up smutty sentences is nullified by a lack of structure and a setup that's full of bugs and boobs
Score
Keith Andrew
Keith Andrew
With a fine eye for detail, Keith Andrew is fuelled by strong coffee, Kylie Minogue and the shapely curve of a san serif font. He's also Pocket Gamer's resident football gaming expert and, thanks to his work on PG.biz, monitors the market share of all mobile OSes on a daily basis.