South Park: The Fractured But Whole Review: The farts of future past

A follow-up to the critically acclaimed South Park: The Stick of Truth, does The Fractured But Whole manage to match or top the standards set by the first game?

Developer: Ubisoft
Publisher: Ubisoft
Platforms: PS4 (version reviewed), PC, Xbox One
Release Date: October 17th, 2017

South Park: The Stick of Truth is easily one of the best licensed games ever made. That may sound like backhanded praise given the general reputation of licensed games, but it stands there with series like the Batman: Arkham games an example of how to do it right. It had a surprisingly deep yet accessible battle system, managed to be a very fun send-up of fantasy and RPG tropes, had a bunch of fun references even for lapsed fans such as myself who hadn’t seen an episode in years and it looked amazing, totally feeling like a full season of South Park itself.

So, how do you follow up such an impressive debut? Maybe by going bigger, longer (and uncut)? For South Park: The Fractured But Whole, a lot has changed. The kids are now super-powered heroes instead of fantasy warriors. There’s  a completely new grid-based battle system along with a crafting system and a new “artifact” system that mostly determines your level. All these are welcome changes that do help the gameplay feel completely different from the previous game, and that’s mostly what kept me going through my about 20 hours in the town of South Park. Because unlike the last game, the humor doesn’t land nearly as well and the story drags quite a bit near the end.

Let’s start with the positives: as I mentioned, the battle system in South Park: The Fractured But Whole is drastically changed and I think it’s for the better. I did like the battle system from the first game, but it was getting a tad stale near the end and I think a whole new game with roughly the same system wouldn’t have felt nearly as entertaining. Battles still happen in a traditional 2D view, but it’s a grid field and positioning is incredibly important, as you have up close and ranged abilities that include healing as well as inflicting damage or statuses on both friends and allies. Being that in this game you are playing superheroes, your party also has super abilities that have a meter that builds up over the course of a battle. Most either do damage to one enemy or have an area of effect attack, but some also heal or give protection.

In this new battle system, status effects take a whole new priority. Enemies and allies can get charmed, confused, bleed or grossed out (basically poisoned) and these status effects can shift the tide of battle tremendously. Luckily unlike some other games, while effects can stack, the damage usually isn’t so catastrophic that your party is essentially down in one turn, but you usually can’t just hope to ignore the effects and make it through the battle either.

All your powers that you can use in the town of South Park to access hidden areas and solve puzzles are based on farting.

Over the course of the game, you also get a wide range of heroes to swap in and out of your party, and they all are pretty useful. I had favorites such as Call Girl and Mosquito, but I used just about every character for at least some significant stretch, and nobody seemed like a bad choice to use.

You get to choose from three initial classes of superheroes, more open up as the game goes on, and you can pretty much mix and match powers as you like as they become available. Want to be a powerful psychic assassin martial artist cyborg? You can totally do that. It’s a little ridiculous but also fits right with the idea in South Park: The Fractured But Whole is that it really is kids playing superhero and they would pretend they have all these ridiculous powers at the same time.

While you gain levels in South Park: The Fractured But Whole, what’s really at play here in determining not just your strength but the strength of your entire party is the “artifact system”. Artifacts are the only thing you equip and you only equip them on the main character. Each artifact has a “rating” and as you gain levels you get more slots to combine more artifacts. Your overall artifact rating determines whether you are powerful enough to proceed in the story or do certain sidequests. I rarely found that I was lacking in my artifact rating as long as I was regularly upgrading as I found new stuff. But this is a very simplified system and those craving deeper customization options will definitely be left wanting. There’s a slight variation in what artifacts you select to use (some give more power to attacks, better health, etc) but it’s never enough to trade off for a significant drop in your overall ranking so it barely matters.

Money is pretty scarce in South Park: The Fractured But Whole, so to make not just items but artifacts, you’ll be doing a lot of crafting. You are either given or can buy recipes for most items, and resources are all over the place, so it’s not hard to build up a good stock. You might be lacking a bit when it comes to the best in-game items such as a revive that heals characters fully, but that’s to be expected and I found they are rarely if ever needed. My one complaint about this system is that you can’t craft multiples of items at once, but it still goes pretty fast so it was never too tedious.

Maybe this will get old by the time we get to a third or even fourth game, but it’s still amazing to me just how good South Park: The Fractured But Whole looks in terms of capturing the look of the TV show. This was pulled off pretty flawlessly in the last game as well, but the game is just incredibly well-animated and looks sharp throughout. Being that you are still in South Park, the town is pretty much the same with only a couple new notable locations. You might have trouble telling houses and some buildings apart, but it still feels very much like the show and that goes a long way in making the whole game just fun to look at.

South Park is a comedy, so it would make sense that the game tries to capture the essence of the show with the creators heavily involved. I felt the first game nailed this almost perfectly. There were lots of fun callbacks but also many clever takedowns of the subject material of medieval fantasy and RPG games in general. In contrast, the humor in South Park: The Fractured But Whole feels a lot more hit and miss.

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The fart humor is doubled down with an even more complicated rhythm minigame for pooping in toilets, which I mostly found annoying and in many cases, unresponsive. Your farts are literally so powerful that you can manipulate time, and all your powers that you can use in the town of South Park to access hidden areas and solve puzzles are based on farting. I’m sure some will find this hilarious, but I found it tiresome in the first game and moreso here.

There’s a lot of references just for the sake of references with no punchline which seems almost more like Family Guy-style humor, a show the creators have been incredibly critical of. There are also some jokes that just feel dated or old or “who is this even for”? such as the already-revealed scene parodying Kanye West’s dedicating a game to his dead mother. I barely remember that had happened and it was over two years ago.

There’s a lot of social humor some will probably feel uncomfortable with. It’s been reported that a group of rednecks attacks you if you are transgender or if you pick a darker-skinned character the game is harder. Neither of these is true. For example, the rednecks attack you no matter what choices you make, and like many jokes in this game, it happens repeatedly. It actually might’ve been funny as one-off, but by the third time, it’s just annoying. There’s a major subplot about racist cops beating up and arresting black people. I’m sure some will feel that this heavily trivializes hardships they’ve had to go through being a minority. At the least, I didn’t find it particularly funny.

That’s not to say that there isn’t some great humor in the game. There were definitely moments where I laughed out loud throughout and there is some fairly clever lampooning when it comes to making fun of the superhero genre and realizing just how silly it is that everything is being taken so seriously.

I also feel like the last act is incredibly stretched out, even though South Park: The Fractured But Whole clocks in at around 20 hours. There is a point that feels like it could’ve been a good point to end the game, but then it goes on for several more hours and all of that just feels unnecessary. It’s a bunch of last-minute twists and revelations that are almost  Shyamalan-esque in their randomness and stupidity. Granted, I get the feeling that part of the joke is how stupid the plot is, but when it just feels stupid on its own merits and not like a parody of stupid plots, you whiffed the joke.

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A copy of this game was provided to App Trigger for the purpose of this review. All scores are ranked out of 10, with .5 increments. Click here to learn more about our Review Policy.