April Edition Live Magazine - April 2014 Issue. | Page 88

review

South Park The Stick Of Truth
I didn’t get to grow up with South
Park. Coming from a certain age
when Bart Simpson was the most
dangerous thing on television, the
boys from Colorado might as well
have been the Antichrist with how
crude their humour was. Even if the
reception on the one channel that
showed it had been good enough,
a cartoon about kicking babies and
eating poop was never going to fly.
As an adult, it turns out all that moral
hysteria was so much hot air: South
Park’s humour is sharp, their commentary cutting and ruthless, and
their morals reasonable and levelheaded in a world gone politically
correct.
Distilling that into videogame form
has not gone well in the past. If
you’re too young to remember the
first-person shooter South Park or
the kart racer South Park Rally, count
yourself lucky: even the creators are
ashamed at how terrible they were
and have committed themselves,
delay after delay, to breaking that
cycle with The Stick of Truth. What
we have gotten for those efforts is
exactly what it should be: an episode
of South Park with you at the helm,
the whole of the quiet little mountain
town open for exploration.
Taking on the role of the new kid in
town, you are drafted into Cartman’s
army in the current Dungeons and

Dragons-style game that they’re
playing for your prowess in battle,
ability to make friends on Facebook
really quickly, and powerful farts.
The game pokes fun at its clichés
even as it embraces them - Cartman mentions that they know taking turns is lame, but that’s just what
they’re going with - and being able to
frame the limits of a game universe
within a bunch of kids actually playing a game greatly helps with getting
to grips with the sometimes obtuse
system Obsidian has chosen. This is
a game that demands your time, but
doesn’t waste it. The level cap stops
at 15, battles can be circumvented
with clever use of the environment,
and a skilful infliction of status effects is necessary for quick and brutal victory. For a game whose source
material is most fervently devoured
by young teenagers, the game really

If you’re not thinking about it and
completely to grips with the system,
you can very easily mess things up
and make the game much harder
for yourself. Missable items and
achievements abound and can be
very well-hidden; if you happen to
be charging through an area and
saved over that file, well, too bad
for you. Restart the game from the
beginning if you want that achievement. Combine that with some occasional framerate issues, unwieldy
keyboard controls, and progression-blocking bugs, and you have
a product which, while solid overall,
is peppered with issues that really
should have been ironed out over
such a long development time.
Then, of course, there are the stormy
waters of censorship. In their usual
form, Trey and Matt chose to mock

“THOSE WHO DON’T ‘GET’ THE SOUTH PARK
BRAND OF HUMOUR MIGHT FIND IT CRASS, OR
OFFENSIVE, OR JUST TOO SHORT.”
expects you to think about your build
and make the New Kid you want instead of some all-powerful demigod
of the frozen Colorado township.
It’s in chasing this goal where the
meat of the game falls down a little.

the censors rather than haphazardly patc