I cannot say I have ever really been a fan of South Park.
Well, that is not entirely true. I was a fan of South Park when it seemed like the entire world was a fan of South Park in the late 90s and early 2000s, then I simply fell off. Ultimately, this lead to me appreciating games like 2014’s South Park: The Stick of Truth from afar, only overhearing the praise the game got for its Paper Mario-style battle system and spot-on graphical style as an observer but not a participant.
I came to South Park: The Fractured But Whole with a level of cautious optimism, but I came away from my time with it appreciating it as something even I, as a lapsed fan, could see myself really engaging with based on its systems.
It Looks Terrible
While this should not be shocking to anyone that has played the last South Park game, but these games look appropriately terrible. They match the look of the show completely, from single-frame profile turns to the awkward bouncing of characters up and down stairs. It works to such great effect that, when higher quality art appears in your menu for a scant few seconds, it is almost always hilarious in its abrupt incongruity. The Fractured But Whole is so terrible looking that it is beautiful, something that is hard to explain but is immediately apparent.
The game has been rebuilt on Snowdrop and uses the actual assets from the show to drop into the newer engine, making for a more authentic experience.
I asked if there would be any enhancements for Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro and was told that the game is targeting the base systems first and foremost, as that’s the main focus. When I inquired about a possible Switch version, Associate Producer Kimberly Weigend remarked that it’s always a possibility, but right now it is just the announced systems.
Placement Matters
Stick of Truth aped Paper Mario very deliberately with its battle system, focusing on the timing of both offense and defense as its core mechanic. While The Fractured But Hole retains the timed button presses, the entire battle system has shifted to a positional grid. When your hero characters engage in battle with enemies, they must move around to get closer to the enemy, or move back to space out their moves as appropriate. You can try to group enemies together, heal your allies in a group, try to avoid collateral damage from your attacks, or cheese enemies by pushing them away repeatedly.
Enemies can also do the same thing to your characters, which can be frustrating when all you’re trying to do is get a melee character into the battlefield and they keep getting pushed out. During one midboss fight, one enemy kept pushing Super Craig out of bounds, which made it difficult to make headway back into the battlefield.
South Park Is Being South Park
For better or worse, The Fractured But Hole is not holding anything back. Ubisoft has given Matt Stone and Trey Parker complete freedom to write whatever they want into the game. It will not lack the show’s edginess, but a lot of jokes left me wincing a little from said edge. The normalization of things like Cartman’s superhero being named “The Coon” kind of reminds me why I dropped off South Park in the first place.
During one quest, the player character visits a Hooters-equivalent known as Raisins, which only hires young girls. The joke was not lost on me, but it didn’t make me feel good that I understood it. The player frees one of the heroes from the apparent clutches of the girls who want the heroes to pay their bills, which causes a battle scene where you bloody the girls up. I wasn’t feeling it, but that was to be expected from the moment I took the quest.
Issues like that aside, which I assume are not designed for people like me, the game makes a strong case for both current and lapsed South Park fans. The revamped battle system is strong and forces players to think through their current options in any given situation instead of committing to just hammering attack buttons to get through. There are parts of the game I genuinely enjoyed, and could see myself wanting to play in the future, which is a genuine turnaround from where I expected to be. It’s just the rest I’m not sure about.
from www.GameInformer.com - The Feed http://www.gameinformer.com/games/south_park_the_fractured_but_whole/b/playstation4/archive/2017/09/07/we-take-the-south-park-heroes-out-of-the-shadows.aspx
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