South Park the Fractured but Whole Video Review

Chances are you already know whether you're going to bask South Park: The Fractured But Whole.

If you played 2014's S Park: The Stick of Truth — a solid function-playing game spin on One-act Central's long-running blithe series — then yous know. Or if y'all've watched much of the cartoon the game is based on, then I assure you, y'all know. Forgive the cliche, simply I've never reviewed a game that better deserves it: The Fractured But Whole is a game made for existing South Park fans. Those fans are going to eat it up, and those predisposed to hating the bear witness aren't going to be convinced by Ubisoft's take on things.

The more challenging identify is the one I occupy: those who are entirely indifferent to South Park. Sure, I watched some of the bear witness when I was in high school, rattling off catchphrases with my friends and giggling when my mom got upset with me. But I've long since grown out of it; I probably haven't watched a full episode in a decade or more than.

If you're a fan, or a devoted anti-fan, this review isn't for you lot. Instead, let's practise as S Park and so often does and take the middle path. Is there something to enjoy in The Fractured Just Whole if you tin't be bothered to requite a shit about the testify one manner or another?

Well … sort of?

Ubisoft San Francisco/Ubisoft

Like The Stick of Truth, The Fractured But Whole puts you in the function of The New Kid, a character whose appearance, race, gender identity and fifty-fifty socioeconomic continuing y'all're able to determine for yourself throughout the form of the game. It's a clever pick that gives players creativity to ascertain their own character, while also giving them control over which characters from the prove they spend time with in their party — rather than forcing them to play every bit, say, a loud asshole like Cartman.

That's not the only matter that The Fractured Only Whole borrows from The Stick of Truth. Despite swapping developers from Obsidian Entertainment to Ubisoft San Francisco, the new game uses the aforementioned core exploration gameplay of walking around a 2.5D representation of the town of South Park and solving light puzzles using your powers. Even the town map is almost identical; I was able to navigate around the city based off my retentiveness of playing the previous game almost three years ago.

What's changed is the genre of the children'south town-spanning playtime. Cartman, Stan, Kyle and the gang have traded in the wooden swords and garbage can hat shields of last game's Dungeons & Dragons parody, and turned their attention toward superheroes. As they attempt to solve the mystery of who's abducting South Park'due south cats, the kids take each adopted their own crime-fighting persona: Cartman is the Wolverine-meets-Batman mashup The Coon, while Jimmy becomes Fastpass, a lightning-quick speedster with a chest symbol reminiscent of The Flash, etc.

As the game progresses, you unlock a total of 12 possible companions who can fight alongside you — up to three of those allies tin can join you in most battles — also every bit nine possible ability types for yourself. The imaginative powers on brandish run the comic volume gamut, from cyborgs to raging muscled monsters. In that location isn't a single popular superhero classic missing that I can recall of.

Well, except for girls. In that location's but ane, and her superhero persona is Call Girl. See, she uses her hacking powers to bust into electronics through her telephone and wreak havoc, but "call girl" is also a euphemism for "prostitute." Become it? I'll talk more than most the sense of humour later.

Ubisoft San Francisco/Ubisoft

These super skills are put to employ in ii means. Start off, there's gainsay. Equally in The Stick of Truth, battles are turn-based, only this fourth dimension Ubisoft has congenital in a grid system that calls for slightly more than strategic thinking. Each power hits a certain number of squares on the grid from a specific range; some will knock dorsum enemies that are hitting, or alter the position in which your grapheme ends their turn. To play optimally, you'll need to think a few turns ahead, planning out how to get enemies lined up to hitting the most possible foes with your most powerful abilities.

The best of these abilities — the ones you really want to plan for — are your ultimate powers. As a fight progresses, a bar builds upward at the top of the screen, inching frontwards for every piece of impairment your team inflicts or takes. When it'southward total, you can use the ultimate ability of any character on screen. These special attacks cut away into full-screen cinematics, slamming enemies with a flurry of funny special effects, just as ballsy equally any Final Fantasy summon.

The Coon's ultimate power is my favorite. Rather than focusing on Cartman being a dick mostly, The Fractured Merely Whole centers on his graphic symbol's outsize ego and ambitions. This is expressed through his want to see Coon and Friends, his superhero squad, become a major cinematic franchise. All of this scheming comes to a head in his ultimate ability, where nosotros get to see The Coon on the cover of major magazines and being interviewed in an episode of Inside the Actors Studio, before he performs a full-screen assault that slashes down every enemy. Information technology'south a clever niggling scene that I never minded rewatching every time I used Cartman's ultimate.

Outside of ultimate abilities, The Fractured But Whole's gainsay organization is relatively fun but maybe a little also easy. This is not a regular complaint for me; I'm more often than not very comfortable with games that aren't focused on difficulty. But at that place's just plenty depth here that I plant myself wishing for more chances to show off some strategy, rather than nonetheless another fight against one-half a dozen jerk sixth-graders.

Ubisoft San Francisco/Ubisoft

The only times I felt challenged were when Southward Park: The Fractured But Whole broke its own rules. In a couple of dominate battles, the game messes with its plow-based system by putting you lot up against bosses with powerful timed attacks. For these special abilities, the timer keeps ticking downward even every bit yous're taking your turn. These moments certainly up the intensity of these fights, but I establish them really frustrating in practice. A few wrong moves, or turns that take too long, and your whole team tin get wiped out.

Beyond gainsay, you can also use powers in the same exploration. Certain segments of Due south Park are initially closed off due to "lava" spills (i.e., cherry-red Legos piled everywhere), heavy boxes blocking your path and other obstacles. Only as you brand your way through the game and make more friends, you'll be able to call on them and use their powers (modified past your own) in order to clear a path.

The Fractured Only Whole tracks progress of how many of these picayune navigation "puzzles" you've solved around boondocks, but even using the term puzzle feels a bit like an overstatement. Within the outset few hours of the game, I was familiar with the four or five dissimilar methods for solving any given puzzle — stopping time, gliding with help from The Human Kite, getting extra muscle from Captain Diabetes and so on — and the game never actually throws any twists out there. You have a pocket-sized scattering of powers, and those powers solve every puzzle in the game in a fairly straightforward way.

Much like the combat, I found the puzzles enjoyable enough. I just wanted them to go a fiddling further, to push me to remember a petty harder. But no, pretty much every obstacle in the game can exist solved with help from 1 of four friends and/or your farts.

Ubisoft San Francisco/Ubisoft

Oh, did I mention that the chief character'due south primary superpower is farting? Whatsoever power set up you choose to give yourself — and they tin be swapped out at will throughout the game — y'all'll always have a subset of, uh, fart powers to fall dorsum on. Your farts are, in fact, powerful enough to curve the fabric of time itself. With preparation from a burrito-selling Morgan Freeman (I don't know, don't ask), yous'll gain the power to rewind fourth dimension, interruption time and fifty-fifty cause a intermission in the space-fourth dimension continuum, summoning a clone of yourself from the past.

Southward Park: The Fractured But Whole's obsession with farts isn't annihilation new — it was present in The Stick of Truth as well — but it provides all the insight y'all demand into the game's approach to one-act. When it'due south not spouting fart and shit jokes, The Fractured But Whole lets loose a torrent of lightly racist and sexist stereotypes for laughs. Some of the game's cutting-edge attempts at jokes include such hilarious observational humor as "Mexicans volition work for very little money" and "strippers are catty."

Beingness offended isn't really my event with The Fractured Just Whole'due south sense of humor. Rather, the problem is that and then many of these attempts at comedy are astoundingly bland. The game'south winking, nudging "minorities, am I correct?!" jokes follow a thread of humor from the show that barely fabricated me express joy when I was 16 in the late '90s. In 2017, it but bores me. I couldn't care enough to be offended by it because I can't fathom who would find it amusing.

Those dull edgelord moments come beyond even worse because The Fractured But Whole does occasionally hint at greater depths. There's a subtle, really likable sweetness to the game and its embrace of kids being kids and using their imaginations. Battles in the street will occasionally be interrupted by a scream of "automobile!" followed by anybody rushing to the sidewalk to wait for the vehicle to pass. I particularly smart fight against an aroused parent featured the adult attempting to footing the kids; only the main graphic symbol had the ability to unground his friends and allow them to act.

The children of Southward Park may be foul-mouthed, but at that place's a surprising wholesomeness to these moments. Moreover, many of the game's side quests reveal more than nigh the kids' difficult personal battles. Stan is struggling to deal with his dad'southward alcoholism; Craig is having problems communicating with the ex-boyfriend he'due south still in love with; Kyle is trying to avoid his annoying cousin until he realizes that maybe he should make time for family. The superhero antics provide an escape for the kids, just also a ways of working through each of these issues.

wrap-up

At the beginning of this review, I outed myself as someone who's not a huge S Park fan, simply I've watched enough of the evidence to understand that this is its modus operandi. It foregrounds loud, over-the-summit, "edgy" humour, and it backgrounds surprisingly thoughtful character arcs. Southward Park: The Fractured But Whole matches the prove'southward foreign mix of intentions; information technology is totally aligned in that style. And in that mode, information technology provided the perfect reminder for why the show (and, to a lesser extent, this game) aren't for me.

The Fractured But Whole'due south breezy combat and puzzles provided a few days of entertainment, and the best moments of the game had me either laughing or, against all expectations, emotionally touched. I don't peculiarly regret my time with the game, only it more often than not made me think almost how much ameliorate the creators of both South Park and The Fractured Merely Whole could do if they were given the opportunity and space to abound up a petty.

South Park: The Fractured But Whole was reviewed using a final "retail" PlayStation 4 download code provided by Ubisoft. Yous tin can detect additional information about Polygon's ethics policy here .

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Source: https://www.polygon.com/2017/10/16/16481094/south-park-the-fractured-but-whole-review-ubisoft

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