South Park: The Stick of Truth

I can't say I was excited by this game when I saw its announcement at the end of a South Park episode since I'm old enough to remember the earlier and pretty mediocre South Park games. But, despite that I decided to take a chance and I have to say this is by far the best South Park videogame that has ever been made.

The development of Stick of Truth was the result of a couple of good choices on the back end that saw some strong minds converge on the project. Trey Parker and Matt Stone the creators of South Park took note of the previous low quality of games that used their IP in the past and for the first time became actively involved in the development on a South Park game. You can really see their influence as well with many scenes in the game actually causing the game to have be censored if not banned in specific regions around the world. They decided to partner up with Obsidian Entertainment, the studio famous for developing Fallout: New Vegas to bring their vision to reality. Published duties were handled by Ubisoft and the game is available on the PS3, Xbox 360 and any PC that uses a Windows operating system. I played the game on Steam, but as I was in the US at the time I was able to buy and play the game normally despite me no longer having access to its review or store page once I got back home to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

I traveled for thousands of miles to buy a game to see this?

What struck me instantly about the game was how it looked and felt exactly like the source material. This was surprising since previous South Park hadn't stuck to the look and feel of the show. I can't stress enough how much this looked and felt like the show and it genuinely felt like I was in my own extended episode of South Park. On top of the visuals being perfect, the voices and sounds were the same quality of those in the show. This wasn't just for the main characters either, even recurring characters had the same voice actors and new characters were voiced with the same quality to ensure there was no break from the experience due to something sounding off, like the one of Cartman's farts or one of the Nazi zombie babies screaming "Seig Hiel!". I really can't stress enough how perfectly this game was designed both in terms of audio and visuals, there really wasn't any room for improvement in either of these realms.

Every closet is just a sea of references.

Having played previous South Park games I'd seen the game play mechanics in there weren't really that engaging and despite this game clearly stating that it was going to be a role playing game with turn based combat I wasn't that excited either. The game has four classes, Fighter, Mage, Thief and Jew all of which are pretty self explanatory and long standing maybe even cliche classes in the fantasy genre so I won't bore you with the details. The combat itself while being turn based is mostly controlled through the use of quick time events to decide the success and failure of any attack or block attempt. Yes, there is some variety in the actions in the quick time events, but switched up from pressing single buttons prompts with one character to mashing two buttons with another isn't really deep or engaging game play especially when you are doing it for your three hundredth time in a row due to a random engagement you couldn't avoid. I will grant that some of the boss fights and mini bosses are interesting as you have to be aware of everything your party is doing and maintain good use of items and status afflictions, its just that it was all more of the same stuff that any fantasy role playing game has done in the past. Before the rage starts to come at me, yes the visuals for the attacks are funny, but their humor fades as you do them over and over and by the end of the game I was pretty bored by the combat.

Not even the god damn Mogorians! could save this game's repetitive combat.

The story did a little to salvage the game from the monotony caused by the combat mechanics, but it didn't really do so by much. While being logical, the story was just an excuse to go from set piece to set piece to cover as much of the South Park universe as possible and get as many cameos and call backs in the game as possible. There were some original jokes in the game itself and that was nice, but as a whole it was mostly recycling the lore that South Park has developed over its long history as a cultural touch stone. I personally enjoyed it being a fan of the series, but I could feel that the game was pretty procedural to get all that stuff in there. The biggest example of this were the additions of closets in the characters rooms that simply had items that you could not interact with from episodes of the show. They were just there for you to look at and go "Hey, I remember that, that was funny.". It showed how lazy the thought process was when the game was being written, it wasn't about making a new story it was all about how to arrange all of the past jokes in a way that made sense.

All and all it was a good day.

Despite the combat in the game being disengaging and the story being a excuse to cover as many old South Park jokes as possible, I enjoyed the game. I had fun playing the game, I laughed a lot while I was playing it and there were definitely many what the fuck moments. However, this game isn't for anyone who is new to the South Park world, none of the jokes or settings have set ups so I can see a lot of the game just going over people's heads and with the game being weak in everything else this game won't have anything to hold new people. While I do recommend it, I do so to people who are already fans of South Park and have been watching it for years, otherwise, just stay away this is a pretty shallow game with nothing new to offer.