With South Park: The Fractured But Whole coming out this week I decided it’s high time that I play South Park: The Stick of Truth because for some reason I had never played it before.
Heading into South Park: The Stick of Truth I was immediately impressed by the visuals they’re nothing groundbreaking but the presentation, however, is superb. You feel like you’ve been injected into the world of South Park from the humour to the characters to the layout of the videogame everything is so quintessentially South Park. Even the game system of The Stick of Truth utilises the iconic humour of Trey Parker and Matt Stone masterfully, for example, the magic is derived from the farts of your character and not only that some of the names of your magical abilities will be recognisable to those entrenched in RPG’s (Dragon Shout anyone?). While you dish out your farts to the various foes you come across, and these range from wood elves to crab people to even the horrifying Nazi zombies, you’ll learn the combat system is a more traditional turn-based affair.
You control your party, a two-man team comprised of yourself and an ally, a particular favourite of mine was Kenny or should I say “Princess” Kenny who uses “her” powers of seduction and “nature” magic (he uses swarms of rats and a unicorn) to devastating effect. Her unicorn spell is easily the best ability from the ally’s you have access to. This does bring me to the cinematic aspect of South Park: The Stick of Truth, it’s amazing, when your allies and your enemies unleash their attacks, in particular, their ultimate attacks the game shows off how funny and intense it can be and it can be a sight to behold especially when I summoned Mr. Slave and he “attacked” my enemies.
There are issues that do bog down The Stick of Truth such as a drop in frame rate which was quite jarring, the game crashed on me and thankfully though it has an auto-save feature that saved me falling too far back in my journey to earn that fabled stick of truth. This brings me to another issue, South Park: The Stick of Truth is not a challenging game sure you might hit a hiccup here or there but once you have the right gear BOOM a difficult fight turns into a cake walk.
I killed Kenny and took his place.
In my opinion though I believe you won’t care when issues like these crop up because there are two major positives, The Stick of Truth is a love letter to Dungeons & Dragons fans. The layout of the world, the vernacular of how the characters speak and the deep cut lore that is dropped every now and then is spectacular and this brings me to the crown on top of this regal venture, the story. It was stated by The Completionist that when Trey and Matt worked on this game they had over 500 pages of dialogue written and it shows. This is an incredible videogame filled with so many amazing characters that we have fallen in love with over two decades and the story is equal parts funny and engaging and that is what brings you back to The Stick of Truth.
South Park: The Stick of Truth is a fantastic game filled with incredible humour, respectible gameplay mechanics and character’s you won’t ever forget. If you get the chance to pick up the game be sure and purchase South Park: The Fractured But Whole because you’ll get a current gen version of The Stick of Truth and that’s well worth the cost so jump in and remember never fart on another dude’s balls.
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