South Park: The Stick Of Truth is a game developed by Obsidian in collaboration with South Park digital studios and released by Ubisoft. It is currently on 360, PS3 and Windows.
Development started in 2009, when Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, approached Obsidian about making an RPG featuring the shows likeness. Up until then, South Park had only ever had two games. South Park Rally and this mess below.
PS1 era baby. Gameplay was mostly chucking snowballs and yellow snowballs at turkeys. It was fun, but notoriously short lived.
South Park: The Stick of Truth is quite a step forward in many respects.
You are "the new kid" who has moved to the eponymous town and becomes involved in an epic role-play fantasy war involving humans, wizards, and elves, who are fighting for control of the all-powerful Stick of Truth. Their game quickly escalates out of control, bringing them into conflict with aliens, Nazi zombies, and gnomes, threatening the entire town with destruction.
It touches upon items and themes from pretty much every episode of the show and show a lot of appreciation towards their fan base.
First, you make your character in a character creation screen reminiscent of the official South Park creator that I used to spend three hundred hours creating on the school computers back when I was 13, before printing off skating decals and mascots and then taping them onto my school planner.
Ah, nostalgia.
Then you hit the ground running and can start doing whatever you please in the 2.5D world.
Once you've picked a character and name, you can pick a class from a list of four. Mage, Thief, Fighter and Jew. All classes have their own unique specialisation and playstyle.
As you progress through the game, you unlock various abilities to help interact with the games overworld and previous places that were inaccessible are now accessible. (e.g. You can only access mouse holes after gaining the ability to shrink. You can only access alien satellites once you have the alien probe in your character etc.)
Battle and combat is an interesting kettle of salamanders because a good percentage of the time, you can avoid combat by killing enemies in the overworld by dropping things on their heads or otherwise incapacitating them. If you fail to do this, you will enter a turn based battle that takes place separately, much like in a Final Fantasy game.
Interestingly enough, the person who goes first in combat is always the one who strikes first and bow attacks can stun enemies, which makes them more vulnerable to attacks.
You can also augment your weapons and armour with patches that increase attributes or do extra damage. You can also cause status effects such as "fire", (damage over time) "gross out", (damage over time and occasional interrupt) "frost" (chance to slow) "bleeding" (a damage over time effect that stacks up to five times.) and "pissed off" (will only attack the character that caused a pissed off effect. cannot use special abilities)
With so many tricks, combat is decidedly easy and most of the times I was stuck on this game were during more technical moments such as performing a robot abortion and using the wrong analogue stick because the wrong one was displayed, using a buddy outside of combat to heal a dying enemy in order for him to talk to me (which had no prompt and I had no idea I could do.) or the very clunky and clumsy fart tutorials that only apply to the Mage class anyway.
It's very much designed like an old school RPG. Lots of depth, but not very intuitive.
Indeed, for a parody game made to not take itself seriously and make fun of everything, it certainly takes the combat and gameplay seriously. And that's something I'm starting to call the "Saints Row 4 effect." The game sits at the back of the class, smiling coyly and explaining how it isn't pretentious and how other games are really nerdy and super lame whilst secretly admiring them from afar.
In order to make fun of text-adventure games and street brawlers, there was both a text-based adventure and a street brawler in Saints Row 4. In South Park, there's a top down 8-bit Canada level with a retro-themed soundtrack.
So you have to wonder where the line between mockery and homage is. Because if you painstakingly recreate that which you're making fun of.... Well, it's just like a dude going down on another dude to prove he's not gay.
It's just kinda weird really.
Also, the game suffers from "Bioshock Infinite Syndrome" in that you can Google the game and the images you get are not in the final product.
This includes the Goth castle, Crab people, Gnome Mines and Hippies, Mr Hankey's Christmas Town and Ginger Redneck kids and a gorilla monkey gargoyle thing. Hopefully they'll be put back in at a later date as DLC. But hey, lots of games end up with hours and hours of content left on the cutting room floor. It's just the industry standard.
All in all, it's a great game. Lots of replayability and long enough if you don't rush through it all, do all your sidequests and eat all your greens.
For something that was almost chucked when THQ went down, I'm really glad Ubisoft picked it up.
One to consider.
