Game Review: South Park: The Fractured But Whole

Find out if the sequel to our 2014 game of the year is worth the buy.

South Park: The Fractured But Whole is the current gen follow up to South Park: The Stick of Truth, a game that released at the tail end of the life spans of PS3/X360 and at the start of the current consoles that include PS4/XBone leaving PC as the one constant depending on whether or not you’ve been adding timely upgrades. 

Similar to Stick of Truth, The Fractured But Whole is a game that revolves all around the kids doing battle amongst themselves for some ridiculous reason. For the last game, it was all about getting “The Stick” but as kids do, they get bored of that game and wanna play something else. As a result, all the hard work you put in for Stick of Truth to be the king while playing the main character means squat for The Fractured But Whole which means you gotta build your character, up through another RPG that takes place in the quiet mountain town of South Park.

Like Stick of Truth, battling South Park’s litany of characters is the name of the game all in the name of helping Cartman solidify his team, Coon and Friends, as the bankable movie/TV franchises. The Civil War premise introduced at the end of the preceding South Park episode is as a result of the Freedom Pals having their own stake in getting in on the potential Hollywood cash that comes with being a comic book franchise. Regardless, as the main character, you see a fair share amount of both doing battle with and against both sides. You’ll need as many characters as you can get, too, because, like Stick of Truth, you have to do a fair amount of combat to get what you want in The Fractured But Whole.

And this is where a LOT of the development dollars went to it seems. While traversing through dangerous territories that will see you have to do battle with the “Raisins”, Mephesto’s Boss, strippers, and Professor Chaos’ minions, you gain accolades and increases in artifacts and XP that help build up your homemade character until it’s a lethal weapon. To do that, the real fun is playing almost a Magic the Gathering-type experience where you have to build up a “deck” of characters with different abilities and weaknesses for the purposes battle. For example, doing battle with ninjas you might want a certain type of team whereas with the sixth graders you may want a completely different set of playable characters. Even your own character goes through vicious changes during the game spanning different classes that require you to take on various combat classes that help you gain new abilities that will hopefully come in handy later on in the game.

Like any good RPG, you spend a lot of time tinkering with your character’s look by acquiring costumes and other cool add-ons that have both functional and fashionable appeal (the latter of which comes in handy when you gotta deal with Bebe) all the while taking on various types of story and side missions as well as mini-games. By far and away, the one thing that The Fractured But Whole did versus Stick of Truth was REALLY add-on the mini-games that include different exercises like shitting in other peoples’ toilets, gaining fart abilities to be used for both missions and solving puzzles to get hard-to-get artifacts, and a whole lot more.

Where The Fractured But Whole falls short is in plot and in some repetitiveness when it comes to fighting characters in the game. Whereas I felt The Stick of Truth did a better job of digging deep into the South Park mythos to go along with chunks of missions that were so nuts that they could only be done by the producers of South Park, The Fractured But Whole was a bit more generic after extensive play-through. In terms of crass content, the game is nowhere near as controversial as The Stick of Truth which probably explains the lack of alternate versions in the various parts of the world this time around, but I had fun with the added focus on combat that included the addition of summons, fun costumes ( I played dressed as a character from head to toe from Assassin’s Creed as a result of my long-standing Ubisoft U-play account) and tons of fart humor that should appease even the most casual of South Park fan.

Score
8/10