Game details Developer: Ubisoft/South Park Studios

Publisher: Ubisoft

Platform: Windows PC (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4

Release Date: October 17, 2017

ESRB Rating: M for Mature

Price: $60

Links: Steam | Official website Ubisoft/South Park Studios: Ubisoft: Windows PC (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4October 17, 2017M for Mature: $60

Three-and-a-half years have passed, and yet I still can't get over how good a video game South Park: The Stick of Truth turned out to be. Licensed games have improved a lot in recent years, but their quality is never guaranteed, and the South Park license had never been used to solid effect until that 2014 RPG came along. (A major legal-rights shuffling didn't help Stick of Truth's pre-release worries, either.)

In that game, Obsidian Entertainment and South Park Studios took roughly 15 years of South Park material (basically, everything after the Bigger, Longer, and Uncut film), then recapped and celebrated the series' best characters and most NSFW plotlines. More importantly, its power as a video game was used to incredible effect, whether by sending up RPG tropes and traditions or by making its interactive moments nearly as funny as its scripted ones.

That's quite the bottle of lightning, and there's no shame in the fact that its video game sequel, this week's The Fractured but Whole, doesn't recapture the same incredibly crude magic. But it's still sad how much the series' new developers at Ubisoft missed the mark here. This is by no means a bad video game—and effort was absolutely poured into making its RPG elements feel more substantial than last time—but the LEGO bricks of this game's combat, exploration, themes, and South Park-caliber script were all put in the wrong order.

Tactical shift... for the worse













































South Park: The Fractured but Whole opens with a lingering battle from the last game in which warring factions face off in Tolkien-styled combat, but it doesn't take long for the neighborhood kids to shrug off their swords and wizard hats. Fantasy's out, guys. Superheroes are in. Thus, the game picks up on the TV series' boys-playing-superheroes conceit—which existed well before Stick of Truth came out, mind you—so that Cartman can find a lost kitty and get a $100 reward. (And, of course, act like a total sociopath along the way to his hopeful cash prize.)

You're still the neighborhood's "new kid," and you're now stuck between two warring factions of made-up superheroes: Cartman's Coon and Friends, and their rivals, the Freedom Pals. This schism arose, if you're wondering, because the boys couldn't agree on whose superheroes would be first to receive their own feature-length films or Netflix series. ("We're going to make a billion dollars," Kyle says to Stan at one point in the game while trying to get him back on the side of Coon and Friends. "We're going to make a zillion dollars," Stan replies before zipping away as his Toolshed alter-ego.)

In some ways, the game that unfolds is similar to the Stick of Truth. You have to wander around the town of South Park, which looks exactly like the cardboard cut-out TV show, and complete a variety of quests (primary and side) while getting into turn-based battles. Once more, nearly the entire cast is voiced by series creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, and there is a lot of dialogue here, either in cut scenes, in combat, or while wandering around town. The show's official writing team chipped in dialogue and plot development, as well, and it shows. Ye gods, does it show. (I'll get to that.)















This time, combat goes beyond the simpler, Paper Mario-style battling from last game. All battles take place on a grid of squares, usually five squares tall, and every character's powers blast out in a grid pattern of some sort—maybe horizontal, vertical, diagonal, or some weird pattern (like a bomb dropped a short distance away). The new kid can pick from a ton of melee and ranged abilities to create your dream mix of attacks and heals, though you can only have three normal attacks and one "super" attack equipped at any time. The rest of your functional variety will have to come from whichever other friends you have at your side.

How you arrange your characters matters, since certain moves only work horizontally or vertically, while others push foes or pull friends. And since characters can only move so many squares each turn and can get in each other's way, you'll have to think a few moves ahead in some of the harder battles. The new kid eventually unlocks time-manipulation moves, as well, and these cancel out one enemy maneuver every four or five turns.

This all goes quite a ways beyond last game, and, on paper, it sounds pretty rich. The problem is, SP:FBW hamstrings its potential with battles that ultimately feel slow and simple. Tactical RPGs are at their best when attacks go beyond just doing damage, but this one doesn't offer a lot of meaningful battle choices. Even if you crank up the battle difficulty in the options menu, the only real meaningful choice is picking when you drop your healing powers. There just aren't enough buffs or status manipulations on the battlefield, let alone opportunities to do anything meaningful with them. I repeated the same kind of "move my characters here, here, and here" strategy every battle, and SP:FBW makes this repetition feel even more glaring by dumping copycat battles onto players again and again. There just aren't that many bad guys, and everybody shouts the same catchphrases at each other.

They even ruined a pooping mini-game

"Slow" is the operative word for the bad parts of SP:FBW. The game has a lot of fetch quests, certainly more than the original game, and this time around your progress on the primary plot is halted if you don't finish some of them. You'll run across the entirety of South Park in slow, cartoon-cutout speed from task to task, and while there's a shortcut system, even that boost is still slow. The game's "fastpass" network has about a dozen spots in all, but very few are right next to any of the locations that players repeatedly need to run to. If you want to auto-warp between points, you have to run up to one in the game, as opposed to pulling up a menu and just tapping away (and even the fastpass menus, once found, are clunky).

Unlike last game, the side-quest content is really lacking in comedy. One incredibly overwrought quest sums it all up for me: you have to run back and forth between the characters Tweek and Craig and speak to the two kids on each other's behalf, with nary a joke appearing in any of their pouty, shouty chatter. This takes about seven back-and-forth runs.

There are other slow stinkers: Big Gay Al wants you to find his lost cats, which requires using a clunky time-freeze move and has no other real payoff; another character wants you to put up flyers in various parts of town (as in, you just walk up to various map points and tap the "A" button); the game's hilarious-at-first mini-game of controlling your bowel movements becomes excruciatingly boring the 17th time; and the game rewards experience points for simply poking around the cupboards, drawers, and boxes all over the game world and finding certain items. Sometimes, these will have funny or odd names, but they're mostly just callbacks to things that have appeared in other episodes.

That's not to say there's nothing funny about SP:FBW—far from it. Not all of the big-swing jokes land as successfully as in the original game, including a creepy shoulder-rub ambush by Catholic priests. The game is also really obsessed with players getting into long conversations with adults about how they perceive their own race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, which leads to lengthy, choice-driven chats with the likes of school counselor Mr. Mackey and PC Principal. I found these obnoxious at times while eventually appreciating their Andy Kaufman-esque absurdity by the end. The biggest disappointment comes from how little any of those choices actually impact the game—which means all of those "the game is harder if your character is black" stories turned out to be nothing more than window dressing. That's a blown opportunity for jokes or discomfort in every way imaginable. But the game's most intense jokes got serious, eye-bulging laughs out of me, including one scene in which I had to control a series of farts on a drunken man expecting a lap dance, and another in which I had to follow orders and arrest a man who was obviously only being arrested for being black.

The "this is funny because it's interactive" appeal of SP:FBW is far, far slimmer than the first game. Stone and Parker's writing team focused their efforts on the primary quest line and its lengthy cut scenes, which sees Cartman's search for a lost kitty and a $100 reward devolve into a bonkers treatise about drug use and worldwide crime syndicates. The game's three-day structure equals out to about three or four series-caliber episodes, and just like last time, you'd better be a fan of the South Park humor ethos to appreciate the M-for-Mature content on offer. (Be warned: this game also has fifty zillion fart and poop gags, replete with wet and dirty sound effects. These are further emphasized because the game's incredibly slow fart-based powers have to be activated to get through many of the game's doors and blockades.)

The cut scenes do a great job sending up Kyle and Cartman's over-serious childishness, but the kids' "we're playing like serious superheroes" attitude spills over into the monotonous fetch quests and general adventuring, and it gets tiresome. In spite of the effort by Stone and Parker, Ubisoft didn't hold up its end of the bargain—the game fails to make fun of how much SP:FBW feels like the worst parts of a Far Cry or Watch Dogs game, where fetch quests exist to simply keep players busy. Instead, it just becomes the worst parts of those games.

For all of the content I really enjoyed in SP:FBW, I am jealous of those of you who get to watch someone play this game instead of slaving through it yourselves. There's $60 of content here, undoubtedly, but I'd happily pay Ubisoft for a slimmed-down non-interactive version with the unfunny game portions trimmed out. I loved how well Obsidian nailed the balancing act of "make it funny and make it interesting to play" last time. Ubisoft deserves credit for trying something new but not for how badly they stumbled.

The good:

South Park Studios returns with TV-caliber presentation, dialogue, and performances that reach the same gut-busting highs and lows as the series.

The bad:

New tactical-RPG fights seem cool at first but quickly prove monotonous.

Over-serious tone is broken up by the game's funny cut scenes but less so by the gameplay.

If Ubisoft made this as a satire of its own fetch-quest games, we couldn't find the part where it stops being terrible and gets funny.

Every step of the way, something slow or boring undermines the script's attempts at humorous momentum.

The ugly:

The game's "harder if you're black" window dressing turned out to be untrue—and is one of many interesting potential gags left unexplored.

Verdict: Watch it—or, better yet, wait for someone to edit a full run into something even more watchable.