Douche Defender

Very often Douche Defender feels like the videogames your mother warned you about. It’s a little bit like those old websites that still exist in places on the internet. No one thing tips you off, but you feel it in your gut: I shouldn’t be here. Still, like all Big Head Mode games, Douche Defender isn’t without its charms. And this one comes with deep insights too.

See, Douche Defender is about pickup artists. Or, more formally, Pickup Artist Douches. This simple trivia game pits you, a big-headed damsel, against a lineup of goal-driven douches whose giant faces are seemingly culled from the internet (Duchovny’s in there at least) and your facebook friends. Your own visage comes either from facebook or your device camera. Anyways the douches hit you with a line and you say Yes he’s a pickup artist, or No he ain’t. This is largely a multiplayer affair, though you can play alone, for a price. The depth of the game comes from the fact that the pickup artists are (supposedly) hitting you with real pickup knowledge that (supposedly) works. As you play the game over and over again, you begin to develop your own database of pickup artist douche tells, and the persona of the artist begins to solidify. It’s a conniving science they employ, and this science is at the root of the psychoanalytical power that Douche Defender wields.

The complexity of the pickup craft does give some legitimacy to the pickup artist moniker. Really the question Douche Defender is asking is what does the dividing line between douches and pickup douches say about how society perceives aggressive sexual courting. On the one hand we have douches who are cheesy, and dim-witted, who barely have a chance with women. On the other, we have a group of men who have reduced the interaction to a science. They wear eyeliner to make their eyes seem bigger and more youthful, they rock back on their heels to make you feel they’re always about to leave, and instead of telling you what you think you want to hear (compliments) they provoke you into liking them by acting aloof or uninterested. Now, because we live in a place called the real world, we know that men of both groups are successful in netting and bedding (and sometimes wedding) women. Are the scientists the bad guys, because it is a science? It’s hard to make a real judgment hear. Is a well-planned trick more morally egregious than a poorly planned trick if both succeed? If neither succeeds?

Douche Defender puts up a good front – the fiction works: the combination of real pickup moves, giant heads and the frequency of your encounters all coalesce to make you annoyed. But you know, meaningfully annoyed. You begin to develop two simultaneous frustrations at 1) hearing the same pathetic attempts over and over again, and 2) being tricked by a pickup artist. It’s very easy to fall into a rabbit whole of assumptions playing Douche Defender. I mean shit, I’ve used these lines on women before! So it’s no wonder that you start to think you feel like any uninterested woman might in these situations. And just as the lineup of hopeless bar-going, beach-stalking men never ends, so too do the douches never stop coming. The constant flow of easy obvious douches lulls you into a sense of safety when bam, a real pick up artist appears – you’ve gotta stay on your toes to stay safe. There’s also never a dude who’s not a douche. It’s douches and pickup douches. Now, am I talking about the game, or the game? In this way, Douche Defender is the one of the most important simulations of human drama I’ve ever played. Mechanically, next to nothing interesting is going on (though, in a wonderfully realistic twist, the dresses, hair colors and shoes you unlock throughout the game have exactly zero effect on how any of the douches treat you). But the idea, the context of the trivia, is so ripe for internal analysis it’s frankly disturbing. Like an excellent piece of literature, Douche Defender is a mirror: what does a douche see when he plays it I wonder. A joke? A condemnation of his life? Or a promotion of the pickup lifestyle?

Hard to say. My cynical soul compels me to believe Douche Defender is a Trojan horse. On the outside, a douche defense training program – on the inside, a pickup art 101 class. Three quarters of the way down Douche Defender’s main menu are links to popular books, videos, and even music about pickup artistry. You may have seen one of these brash young men on a late night television show, pimping his book and utter mastery of female desire. And just like a good pimp’s book, Douche Defender does indeed drop knowledge. Spend only a few hours with the game and soon you’ll be spotting pickup artists like dice on the table! Though to be fair to the game it does open with the following blurb:

This game teaches women to identify pickup artists. In the wrong hands, the material contained within could be used for evil. If you are a douche, please leave.

My hope soul wants to believe this is a true. Clicking the I Am Not A Douche button should mean something! And you know – it does. What was it I just say about mirrors? When I looked into Douche Defender I saw a douche too. Not a pickup artist douche, but a confused douche. As I tapped my way through the trivia I learned not only all the mistakes I had made in approaching women, but also discovered that many of my successes also lined up perfectly with pickup art. A dark truth: the tricks pickup artists use sometimes border on sincerity. The other tricks they use are entirely reminiscent of all those awful girlfriends I had who played me like a fiddle! If you're my girlfriend and you're reading this, I'm not talking about you. Probably a good time to wrap this up though, huh?

Big Head Mode is a developer of simple, funny games. They tend to have somewhat poor UI (blurriness and mismatched fonts/art styles) and their fair share of bugs, but good ideas. Ideas worth a laugh, if not always dollars. Plus, the developer’s basic promise, which is that playing games with your friends’ giant faces plastered all over them is funny, is true. The only things holding this score back from a perfect five are issues with stability, poor synching of scores, janky, ugly UI (except the spot on logo), a random opponent mode that has far too low a ceiling for number of opponents per day, and some poorly written text menus. The game does at least continue in the tradition of BHM’s economies, which are far from the worst offenders in the iOS F2P ghetto (with the possible exception of NomNomFace). Douche Defender doesn’t have the charisma of PuppetFace or reach the heights of ZombieFace, but it’s also not really interested in being much more than a trivia game – still, due to its bizarre fiction and theme, Douche Defender does prop up a mirror with which users can examine their own minds and thoughts on love, desire and neuro-linguistic programming. Based on book sales, pick up artist douches aren’t going anywhere, and based on Hollywood movies, women are joining the ranks of pickup douches in droves too. Keeping this in mind, I believe Douche Defender is required gaming for any young adolescent mind. It’s true that dragging a child to fire might get them burned, but they could also learn some important, lifelong lessons about themselves and others.

SCORES

for the App Store: 3 out of 5

for Giant Bomb: 2 out of 5

for your mind: 10 out of 10