Just for the record, you can make a game where the main character farts so much he fractures his butthole and requires a sphincter splint, but Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s latest tactical RPG’s title conceals a certain subtext of wordplay when the kids of South Park are suddenly “fractured” into two distinct and highly competitive groups mirroring the ongoing rivalry between the Marvel and DC franchises. While at its core, South Park: The Fractured but Whole delivers the same solid RPG design and content of the 2014 Stick of Truth game, the superhero facelift is undoubtedly topical with movies, Netflix and network TV dominated with endless superhero shows – something Eric Cartman is determined to mirror with his own Coon and Friends franchise.
This surprisingly deep and substantial sequel wastes no time in kicking off with all the clichéd staples of pop-culture. Scrambles the cat has gone missing and with a $100 reward on the line, Cartman…err…the Coon is determined to find it and use that reward to launch his own Netflix and movie franchise. The only problem is that the rest of the South Park youth are still LARP’ing The Stick of Truth, so the Coon must travel back in time and get them all to switch into superhero mode. Once assembled at the Coon Lair the group of kids are quickly divided into two warring factions; the Freedom Pals led by Timmy doing his best Professor X impersonation working from Token’s basement lair in his mansion, and Coon and Friends.
As before, you’ll be playing the New Kid who is quickly inducted into Coon and Friends when Eric assigns him a chilling backstory and his choice of some superhero categories and power assignments. This is the beginning of character creation that actually continues late into the game, with other attributes like race, gender, alignment, and religion getting filled in after lengthy discussions with Mr. Mackey and Jesus. Not that any of this really matters aside from the frequent Redneck encounters who “don’t take kindly to…”
South Park: The Fractured but Whole mixes up the core power system of the game by stripping away all attributes and buffs from the clothing and putting all of it into a Powers system that is dictated by your chosen class, a changeable core DNA strand, and up to eight Artifacts that can be slotted and changed up throughout the game. As you get deeper into the adventure you are allowed to double, triple, and even quadruple class your character, giving you a nice assortment of power choices and near-infinite replay potential since you can only sample four of the twelve classes in any single game.
Yet even with all these choices you can only equip three powers and one superpower for any given battle. These powers are also directly influenced by your attributes, so you will want to have the proper DNA equipped to boost the attributes that best enhance your chosen set of powers. It sounds terribly complicated, but there is a fun color-coded icon system that makes all this power management stuff super intuitive.
Power selection is important since you will be mixing and matching offensive abilities with defensive and healing powers, and all abilities are now limited by the new grid-based range and movement system. When you highlight an ability lit squares show range and pattern of effect for that power, so it is important to choose powers that complement each other as well as your teammates. Prior to each battle you can switch up the roster for your team, choosing up to three characters to assist. This gives you a diverse selection of individual abilities to add to your own, so if Fastpass is a regular member of your team you might want to forego Speedster class powers of your own. Later in the game you will get to play with Freedom Pal characters, so you can experience everyone’s abilities eventually.
Additionally, you will gain sidekick powers that allow you to summon Captain Chaos, Toolshed, Human Kite, or Captain Diabetes to overcome certain environmental obstacles to solve puzzles or collect any of the hundreds of collectible items in this game. These buddy powers appear about halfway into the game, giving you plenty of valuable incentive for revisiting the entire South Park map to access new areas and grab all the loot you couldn’t get earlier. This is where the Fastpass fast-travel system becomes a huge time-saver.
Fans of The Stick of Truth will know how fundamental farts are to the game, and the New Kid’s ability to pass insane amounts of gas at will (a phenomenon that is actually explained late in the game) comes into play during exploration and combat. Those sidekick powers mentioned above are all fueled by farts, but your farts also have the ability to affect time and space. You can actually fart to freeze time for about five seconds allowing you to navigate hazards or flip switches before you yo-yo back to your original position. In combat you can freeze time to sneak in some extra attacks or rewind time to force an enemy to lose their turn, or even fart a duplicate of yourself from another time into existence to aid you in battle, effectively doubling the New Kid’s abilities for a few turns. Much later in the game you can even fart to change night into day, and vice versa. And most of these farts are powered by specialty burritos sold to you by none other than Morgan Freeman…who else?
South Park: The Fractured but Whole has an even mix of combat and exploration. There are countless collectibles ranging from missing cats to Tweek and Craig boy-love fan art and dozens of toilets to violate in a fun mini-game with ranked difficulty. There are tons of ingredients that fuel the in-depth crafting system used to create food, items, artifacts, and costumes. Since wardrobe no longer affects actual gameplay, you are free to mix and match from 40 superhero costumes divided into three categories giving you 64,000 possible combinations.
The turn-based combat from the first game is enhanced with the new grid-based tactics model that is seamlessly integrated into the game. Character thumbnails indicate the sequence of attacks so you can plan ahead or interrupt enemy turns. Each character has a limited field of movement before they can unleash one of their abilities to attack the enemy or support their team. Later in the game real-time elements get added into the turn-based system, making things even more challenging. As combat continues the superpower meter slowly ticks up until you can unleash a superpower attack complete with epic animation sequences that never get boring.
Speaking of animation; South Park: The Fractured but Whole is as close to playing an actual episode of the show as it gets, with flawless art design, great character models, and all the familiar voices we’ve come to love over the years. The dialogue is super-smart and excessively raunchy, definitely pushing all the buttons for race, gender, religion, and political bias. The game has no problem with boys beating up shallow Raisin Girls, drug-fueled black strippers, or even defending your gifted butthole from molesting priests or a certain sandwich spokesperson. Every building you enter and every person you meet in South Park is going to trigger something unexpectedly fun and certainly hilarious for those with an open mind an irreverent sense of humor.
The graphics and sound are flawless, and despite numerous reports of bugs and glitches in the game, I only experienced two – one widely reported bug where you can resurrect a character into an unplayable square and the other where the screen turned black – but both were resolved with a reload of the last checkpoint. There are also fanatical gamers ranting about DRM and the forced inclusion of Uplay, even for Steam players. I’m playing the Uplay version of the game, so Steam isn’t an issue, and neither was anything else. Uplay is a great delivery system that even comes with Rewards that earned me some free stuff like my sweet Assassin’s Creed robes.
My first pass took just over 39 hours to fully complete the game on a pre-release build, which is where I experience the two previously mentioned bugs, and I played another 15 hours on a second playthrough on final retail code without a single issue. If I had any single issue with the game, it might be that the game didn’t seem to know when or how to end. It just kept going long after it logically should have stopped, and when it did abruptly fade to black, and the closing credits started rolling I was completely unprepared.
The game is running on the Snowdrop engine, so system requirements are a bit higher than The Stick of Truth but given the art style and mostly static nature of the gameplay, most reasonably powered PC’s should be able to run this game. While my GTX 1080ti card was able to run the game at 4K, there is absolutely no visual benefit to running the game at anything higher than 1080p.
If you are a fan of South Park, especially of any of the Coon and Friends episodes, then you are going to absolutely love South Park: The Fractured but Whole. They even released a prequel TV episode that leads into the game – make sure to watch it. Even without the South Park façade there is truly a quality RPG engine at the heart of this game, with enough characters, classes, abilities, and extended adventure, along with thoughtful tactical strategy to keep you entertained for hours, weeks, perhaps months. With so many ways to play and replay, this is one superhero saga that will prove timeless…or maybe that’s just the New Kid farting on my review.
