User blog:Cryptar/My Review of South Park: The Fractured But Whole

What follows may be considered minor spoilers including a few low-level joke spoilers.

I played the Stick of Truth back when it first came out but when I did I seem to remember setting it down for a bit mid playthrough then picking it up again. It was a very good game but I feel you need to be in a certain mood for it, like you can't just pick it up on any day and play it if you want to get the whole way through. Furthermore, I was quite put off by the censorship, something that was in no way the fault of the game makers and the big two did a good job of royally ripping on the situation as well as describing what was happening whist I was looking up the scenes on Youtube anyway.

So the sequel, I only picked it up around when the expansion was released; I wanted to be in the mood for it and see it through. Needless to say, despite the timely playthrough (literally, because it had DLC and presumably patches) I thoroughly enjoyed the game. Not only are there some highly memorable scenes, like how the Lego is lava (very applicable to me because I love Lego and it hurts so much stepping on some it feels like you stepped in lava lol) but also when you change out of your outfit an a random kid takes the mick out of you. There were some more but I want to avoid spoiling them.

But what I think really made the game was the lines; they weren't just the exact same lines over and over but contextual; I did hear a few repeated but it wasn’t too bad and I was impressed at the context-sensitive lines according to who was in your party and how the enemy took damage. I even read from an article the number of lines recorded was enough for five major movies. This is very different to the first game where in combat I would hear Butters say, "You're rubber, I'm glue!" over and over again. The fact I remember this from a long time ago shows how much that line was burned into my brain lol.

The combat is streamlined, I don't see that as a bad thing and if I want more complexity it leaves the first game as a viable option. In fact, for the longest time I have wished for a game where you could somehow apply bonuses gained from outfits to your favourite one - in the Stick of Truth if you pick something up you like for the start of the game it's kind of too bad because it's quickly outclassed. Now you can spend the whole game in the same outfit if you want, which I more or less did, thanks to the artefacts/DNA system.

I don't mind a lack of weapons and it was fitting for the superhero theme. I know there are plenty of superheroes with weapons but each power that uses a weapon essentially spawns an appropriate one, which is not too "out-there" considering from the start of the first game my Thief, who was equipped with a wooded 'dagger', would pull out a metal shank for backstabs lol.

There's a lot of timely humour too, which is one of the best things about South Park. Filling out your character sheet with ludicrous levels of declarations about yourself, which could have probably been taken further but that might overdo it. I especially found it funny about how 'bad it was I had to share the cis toilet with other cisgenders'. Incidentally, it was actually quite useful to have a free hit for a microaggression because there is a lot of combat with sixth graders and, appropriately enough, they tend to have quips that PC Principal thoroughly disagrees with.

My only gripes are the speed your character walks, you can no longer truly run and I definitely notice how in the first game you can get about town faster. Indeed, I was a little annoyed at the restrictions on access to the town and felt most comfortable when most of it was accessible. It was probably because when you can access areas you can generally enter buildings immediately, unlike the first game, but I still feel it was a little overdone. What especially irritated me was a very unnecessary 'lava' pile next to the cinema where you could access both sides but not quickly walk from one part of the screen to the other. They clearly wanted to force you to go the long way the first time but they could have done it differently; in the first game there was a rat infestation to the right blocking the row where Cartman's house is from Kenny’s house etc but if you come back from Kenny's the rats will be gone.

But this is not looking down on either game, in fact the sequel was so good it has spurred me on to play the first game again (PC this time where there is no dreaded censorship). I don't like giving games a rating but I would thoroughly recommend this game to anyone, fans and non fans as even though there's a lot of in-jokes it's not necessary to know much about the show or even to have played the first game, yet having played the previous one it still felt like a continuation. If they do make another game, I hope for a similar model especially the combat and equipment style.