Game Review: South Park The Fractured But Whole
The humor definitely didn’t grab me as much as the first game. I don’t recall if the first game had the sheer amount of gross-out humor as this one, but I do remember enjoying the humor of the first game a lot more. My gut feeling is that the first game was 30% gross-out humor and 70% clever humor or callbacks, and this game is more like 80/20. The Fractured But Whole’s brief answer to the brilliant NES Canada world is a short minigame in the vein of Flappy Bird and doesn’t compare.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s definitely some clever stuff in there — PC Principal is always a blast, Clyde and Tweak are hilarious, and there are some sequences that are pretty funny overall. It just didn’t leave me as satisfied as the first one. The plot starts taking off toward the end but, and I don’t want to spoil anything, there’s a scene in the second to last segment that made me genuinely uncomfortable. It’s not bad for a game to have a scene that makes your skin crawl, but it’s not what I signed up for here — this is South Park the game, not get depressed and cringe the game.
The superhero theme is very interesting, but just like the gameplay, it’s a mixed bag. For your own character, there are tons of cool classes to choose from — but you only get four skills and there’s very little synergy between skills. You pick 4 that are independently useful without much regard or thought for how they work together.
The mixed bag applies to your allies as well, who take on personas like the Human Kite and Tupperware — to be blunt about it, they are, for the most part, lame. It’s intentional, it’s part of the joke that they’re kids playing superheroes and their superhero concepts are lame. But they’re still lame. In games I always want to fill my team with the coolest characters, and it’s slim-pickings here. Also, no Mint-Berry Crunch? C’mon, man.
