PC Game Review: “South Park -The Fractured But Whole” — Better combat but overall less fun than “The Stick of Truth”
There have been a handful of bad and/or boring “South Park” video games. This game is not one of those. “The Fractured But Whole” (a pun which I took way too long to register before buying the game) comes a close second to “The Stick of Truth,” which featured the characters playing D&D clearly inspired by “The Lord of the Rings” while uncovering a plot involving aliens and which also featured a battle with Khloe Kardashian’s giant aborted zombie fetus in which a clever costume change would give you the upper hand.
In normal “South Park” tradition, nothing is sacred in TFBW. Costumed kids give a lap dance to drunken businessmen in a seedy strip club. Multiple toilets are strewn throughout for you to engage in keyboard or button mashing to drop a deuce for points. It’s crass but occasionally laugh out loud funny. This game is very R-rated and f*bombs are dropped regularly by nearly every character. If you have kids they are going to want to play this game. Just be aware there is content including Cartman’s reoccuring references to your character’s father having intimate relations with your character’s mom.
Full disclosure: I’m a fan of “South Park” and have been since it first aired. Months before the show premiered on Comedy Central I had produced a parody song for rock radio called “Enter Santa-Man” based on Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” which featured a foul-mouthed little kid lambasting adults who didn’t believe in Santa, so the concept of crass little kids who still had a touch of innocence made me an instant admirer of the show.
Unfortunately, while playing this game I didn’t find myself laughing nearly as much as I did when playing “The Stick of Truth.” In addition to the comedy derived from the story and dialogue in each one, there are a lot of in-jokes and callbacks to the show’s almost thirty years of content in both games. The story in “The Fractured But Whole” is okay but it leans too far into the ridiculous for me. Like I indicated earlier, I’m a fan of parody. “South Park” is usually very good at combining silly with satire. There are a lot of plot twists in this game that are predictable or come out of left field. Granted, the whole point of each beat is to progress to the next fight or puzzle challenge, but “The Stick of Truth” seems to me to be better at making the story an integral part of the fun. Also, the first game had mined so much material from the show that what was left for this newer game included Member Berries, Mitch Conner, Michael Jackson (named for a star indirectly related to his circle when he was alive and NOT Mr. Jefferson as he was called in the show which directly featured his character, which I found to be a strange choice), and a sub-plot about Clyde & Tweek’s gay romance that doesn’t really go anywhere except to give you one attack move that you can easily mimic with other powers.
A lot of the super-powers your character and your multiple teams are allowed to choose from are fun but become repetitive once you find the right combination of characters and powers for each combat challenge. Speaking of combat, a grid-based system replaces “The Stick of Truth’s” layout for each turn-based confrontation and I think it vastly improves the game. You’re either limited by or given an advantage depending on the layout of your characters, the enemies, and any obstacles that might be on the map. In that aspect the game outshines the previous one.
And yes, you can fart on strangers when traveling by foot from one location to another. Their vocal reactions aren’t always funny but the animations are generally hilarious.
My version of “The Fractured But Whole” contained add-on content. “From Dusk ’til Casa Bonita” allows you to explore the famous Colorado restaurant (the actual loctation owned and refurbished by “South Park” creators Matt Stone & Trey Parker) while battling enemies and solving puzzles, while “Bring the Crunch” sends you to a camp for handicapped kids which has been overrun by monsters. Both are fun to play and introduce powers which you can bring back to the main game. ”Danger Deck” is a simulation of the Marvel X-Men’s “Danger Room,” and is a series of fighting challenges that are only for advanced players. Casual players will find the enemies in “Danger Deck” overwhelming or overpowered.
Strangely, one set of enemies which reappear throughout this game is given the short-shrift when it comes to dialogue. During each combat your enemies taunt you with asides. The Crab People from the notoriously strange “South Park is Gay!” episode are saddled with working at a phone store at one point but constantly make references as if they’re still in the store even though your party has expelled them from that location and are fighting them in the street or on a lake dock. It’s a tiny quibble that only slightly hurts the gameplay during these rounds because it pulls you out of what is generally a cohesive presentation that at least tries to follow its own universe’s rules.
The game also features a ton of side quests. Cartman challenges you to find a bunch of social media followers but after meeting his initial requirement you can continue to do so with no effect on the game. There is also a “crafting” section involving gathering materials strewn throughout the levels then creating artifacts and other such things, but I found it tedious and generally not fun once the few items you needed to craft for specific challenges had been created. There are scavenger hunts like costume collections which are interesting but don’t add much to the game either. It was like a bunch of handheld phone games packed into the main game, and felt like a lost opportunity to mock the proliferation of games that extract time and money from users in the show episode, “Freemium Isn’t Free.” A fight involving the Canadian fart masters “Terence & Philip” over it could have been epic, since your character’s most interesting powers involve flatulence! But that’s just a nitpick.
So, do I recommend this game? Yes, especially if you’re a fan of “South Park” and don’t mind combat which requires strategy instead of 3-D shooter mayhem. I honestly wish I could have played “The Fractured But Whole” first. “The Stick of Truth” has a much funnier storyline even though the combat isn’t quite as refined. But I wonder, would that have made me like “Stick of Truth” less? Probably not, because the whole point of playing a “South Park” game to me is to concurrently enjoy the ridiculous parodies contained within. If any developers continue with this series I think they’re going to have a hard time coming up with a story. Playing D&D or Super Heroes both lend themselves to random combat. However, not having that gimmick could also lead to a much funnier story being created. But I’m just speculating from the peanut gallery. This game is definitely worth playing. It’s clever, it’s crass, it did make me laugh out loud quite a number of times, and it’s actually challenging in some places. Vive le “South Park!”
