GAMES REVIEW: South Park: Phone Destroyer(Beta)

Now you can take your South Park raunchiness and insanity on the go. But should it be destroyed?

 

Cartoon tie in games in the past have ranged from notoriously bad like Simpsons Wrestling for the PlayStation to sleep inducing bland like Disney’s Magical Mirror Starring Mickey Mouse as there was always these games out quick and on a low budget to target timely releases. Even South Park wasn’t excluded from their own set of tie-in games including Chef’s Love Shak, South Park Rally and the original South Park for the PlayStation. It wouldn’t be until 2014 with the release of South Park: The Stick of Truth that South Park games started to be recognized as high-quality video games and not just cheap cash grabs like in the past.

The Stick of Truth was a pretty great game, keeping South Park’s style of raunchy comedy and paper cut out aesthetic intact. While also with the help of Obsidian Entertainment, best known for their work on Fallout: New Vegas and Alpha Protocol, developed an engaging turn based fighting system. Although prone to status effect exploits it made for a very fun gaming experience. It played as if you were within an episode of South Park. Now coming up we have the game’s sequel, South Park: The Fractured But Whole, to look forward to which reportedly is delving deeper into making its turn based gameplay more involved but what can we do until it comes out this October?

Luckily South Park Digital Studios and RedLynx, the team behind the platform racing Trials series, has released their new real time strategy game, South Park: Phone Destroyer, to tide fans over during their wait. The question is now, can a free mobile game like this really hold people’s interest before the main event comes in October? In terms of the contextual narrative, it already feels in the same vein as the Stick of Truth as the game opens with all the kids in South Park arguing about what pretend game they want to all play. Ideas to play cowboys, Indians, space men, pirates and more are thrown about until Cartman comes in and puts his fat foot down and says they shall play cowboys and Indians. The other kids aren’t too happy with the idea as the Cowboys always get their asses kick. However, Cartman has an ace up his sleeve, a new kid on the block who is obsessed with his phone. That new kid is you and after being Facetime by Cartman in a nice added touch of aesthetic presentation, you are made the commander of the cowboys who will summon other members of the South Park cast from your phone to your aid to complete each stage and defeat the Indians, robots and more as you progress.

Right out of the gate the game is presented in a much more complex fashion than many other mobile games with a clear contextual narrative to it and keeping the aesthetic style of phones a constant through the gameplay. From your opponents also summoning their fighters through their phones to all in game narration being spoken through text messages. It starts the game on the right foot by immersing the player into the world of the game and in tandem South Park from the moment they boot up the app. But if we put aesthetics aside for the time being how does the gameplay measure up?

Phone Destroyer works on a real-time strategy system where you as the commander summon fighters from your phone to defeat the incoming enemy. You summon your fighters by pulling out a character card from your phone deck and placing it on the battleground, once placed that character is summoned to the field and they will attack the enemy in a multitude of ways, depending on the skills they have listed on their character card. To simplify it, there are 4 types of units ranged, tanks, assassins, and fighters, that each has their own strategic advantages and disadvantages like assassins are fast and powerful but are very weak and will be killed quickly. But that is not all, certain character cards have a charged move, this is where after a certain time frame of being on the field you can click a bubble above their head to activate their move. These charged moves can range from stat boosts for your team, an attack that targets all nearby enemies to healing all party members HP on the battleground. It’s the balancing of skills, the time frame of attacks and your limited amount of energy you can use to summon your fighters. On all the character cards, there is a set amount of energy needed to summon them, like to summon Gunslinger Kyle your phone will need at least 3 energy. If you run low on energy you will need to sit and wait for your phone to recharge but within that time your opponent can counter attack so balancing your energy output is crucially important.

While this is a lot of information to process, the game offers many visual cues to keep players reminded of the basic rules of the game so that it doesn’t feel over complicated. Although with the multiple skills some of the cards can hold at times it is best for trial and error to discover which cards will be your favorite for your deck. Speaking of cards, another aspect of the gameplay is the collecting of your character cards in the multiple modes of the game and the store you can purchase and earn card packs which you can rip open to gain new character cards, coins, and upgrade cards because thankfully the game isn’t just making you collect cards just for completion sake. Gameplay wise collecting multiples of character cards along with the upgrade cards allows you to upgrade your cards to higher levels to boost their health, attack power and the interval between attack. It is very refreshing to see a game actually work the card collecting game style this deep into the overall gameplay. It definitely makes the act of even collecting multiples of the same card a win.

This creates a solid core to the gameplay that strengthens the rest of the game’s mechanics and modes, especially the microtransaction store and PvP. Microtransactions in Phone Destroyer feel the least intrusive and non-mandatory that I have seen in a while as the game makes it freely possible to earn new card packs for free with skill and dedication including winning a set number of rounds in PvP.

Even if some player buys cards from the store to get a leg up on the competition they would still need to work on leveling it up to keep on the same tier of quality like the non-paying players are made to do. As for the PvP in a number of fights I took part in the matches were quick to connect and were structured as very quick and snappy 3 minutes free for all battles. The PvP is definitely where you will see if you are fully taking advantage of the strategy tools given or you are just throwing out cards at random. I would say that is the only detriment to the gameplay, while it does have visual cues to remind players of the basics of how each card works the strategy aspect may be still too complex for some players who just want a simple game to pass the time while sitting on the toilet. For those who are interested in a complete real time, strategy experience on the go Phone Destroyer is definitely worth a look and definitely will tide ya over until the Fractured But Whole makes it store shelves.

If you want to get South Park: Phone Destroyer for your iOS or Android it can be downloaded via the Itunes App Store and Google Play Store.