[Review] South Park: The Stick of Truth

Genre:  RPG

South Park: The Stick of Truth is a game released by Ubisoft, developed by Obsidian. The game basically entails where the last season of South Park [17] left off, pretty much. You hop into the game, create a character and set off on adventures with Cartman, Kyle, Stan and Kenny along with the rest of the crew that’s usually on South Park. The story entails you pretty much. You’re the ‘new kid in town’ in South Park and for your first day, you are pushed out into the world to make friends. You become friends with the first faction in your adventure and a few hours into the game, the second faction (I.E. The KKK and the Elves). Alien abductions, Big Game Hunting with Jimbo and goth kids galore and much, much much more!

Now a little about Obsidian Entertainment before we get into the specifics of the game here. Obsidian Entertainment is managed under Feargus Urquhart, and has various COOs of the company. They’ve produced:

• 2004: Star Wars – Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords
• 2006: The Neverwinter Nights 2 Trilogy
• 2010: Alpha Protocol and Fallout: New Vegas
• 2011: Dungeon Siege III
• 2014 : In conjunction with The Stick of Truth, Pillars of Eternity

Onto the game!

Story [Obviously spoilers so don't read if you don't want spoilers]:

So as I mentioned the game starts out with creating your character, entering the world, etc etc. After the main cutscene you go outside and basically meet up with part of the cast of South Park, namely Cartman, Butters, Token, Craig, Clyde, and Tweek. (Apologies if I’m missing someone) Cartman basically walks you through the tutorial of the game and then off you go. At this point in time you haven’t actually met Craig, Tweek and Token as they’re all in their respective homes and Cartman wants you to go fetch them for him, and so you can introduce yourself to them.

Nothing really happens for awhile, honestly. You get sidequests and quests from Cartman, and learn some new Fart spells, and a siege on Koopa Keep, but other than that nothing special…

Up until you search for the Elven Bard. The Bard is apparently famous and the Elves have stolen the stick in the night. Cartman sends you and a party member to go get the stick from the Bard. You end up going into a dark basement where you have to navigate a bit of a maze of literal ‘stuff’ to get to the Bard. The Bard turns out to be Jimmy, however he flees and leaves you to fight 3 Elves. After the 3 Elf fight, Clyde is at the basement window and wants you to let him in. You fight through a bunch of Elves and then let him in. He unlocks the door for you and you run outside into the kitchen where Cartman is being beaten by multiple elves. Cartman tells you Jimmy is on the run in the house, apparently upstairs where Princess Kenny is also being held captive.

You advance through the house and get upstairs and get into Jimmy’s room. And you beat his ass. Obviously.

That night, you get abducted by aliens. The scene shifts to the alien spaceship, and well… you learn that you have pretty good ass controlling powers, I’ll just say that. You break the aliens’ machinery and find Randy, Stan’s dad, on one of the platforms. Most people are kept asleep on the ship, but Randy is awake and he knows how to get off of the ship. You traverse the ship looking for a way to release Randy and playing a Simon Says type game. Eventually you release Randy and he pretty much just runs away. You go to the front of the UFO and fight some baddies and crash the UFO into the South Park Mall, and the government shows up.

The government tells everyone that the crashed UFO is a new Taco Bell under construction… and everyone buys it but Randy and by extension, you. Meanwhile you’re still on a quest to recruit the Goth Kids to Cartman’s forces, so they tell you to go to the PTA meeting next door to the school, and Randy is in there trying to tell people they’re being ‘probed’ by aliens but he never directly comes out and says it. At this point in the game you need a picture of you holding up a sign given to you by the goth kids, however Randy is willing to help you get the picture if you break into the UFO crash site and find out what’s going on in there.

You break into the site and the building they’ve constructed and find out that the alien crash (as seen in the cutscene earlier) has caused some green liquid goo to drain into the town’s sewage/water systems. The government is focused on containing the threat by whatever means necessary… I.E. blowing up the surrounding city blocks. When you break in to the building, you go through the vents and end up outside the room where a bunch of bigwigs are having a discussion. You basically learn the goo is turning people into… nazi zombies. Who woulda called it? Anyway they conspicuously leave a recording of everything they talked about on the table, so you pick it up and get out of there, and when you leave the whole town at this point is infected. You book it back to the PTA and show Randy the recording, and after that you get your picture of the sign and go back to the goth kids.

The goth kids confirm they will join you, however at this point in time (based on some other requirements earlier) you can either bring them to Cartman’s team, or Stan and Kyle’s team.

I went with Stan and Kyle’s team but the gameplay is basically the same, just different characters from here on out.

So you bring the goth kids to the Elves and they join their army. Now you have to go attack the school because the KKK has stolen the Stick of Truth, and Cartman has apparently hidden it in his desk. So you go to the school and it’s basically another warzone. You fight through the school to the classroom where Cartman is hiding out and you’re given a choice, to double cross the Elves and go back to Cartman’s team, or attack Cartman and solidify your force to be reckoned with on the Elves’ side. You end up attacking Cartman and fighting him. He’s not too hard of a fight.

After the fight you find out that… there’s no storage space on the desks. They’re just tables. However, Clyde’s desk has ‘Check my locker’ scratched on it, and when you and the rest of the group go to investigate it turns out that Clyde has stolen the Stick, and is currently in possession of a very large… death fortress in his backyard of all places. Cartman, Kenny, Kyle and Stan all end up agreeing at a meeting that they need to team up to defeat Clyde’s army of darkness and necromancy. However in order to do that, you need to bolster your ranks. And what better way to tap a population than adding girls to the team?

So Cartman sends you on a quest to recruit the girls to your cause, so you run down to City hall to speak with Annie, a representative of the girls. She’s being harassed by some bullies and you pretty much beat them and have them run off. Annie is grateful to you so she brings you to the girls’ clubhouse. The girls want to ask a favor of you; to pose as another one of the girls’ long distance boyfriend and go speak to one of the girls who is chilling out in the park.

Basically it’s just stereotypical girl stuff and in the end they find the ‘two-faced bitch’ and forgive her and then come join your cause, in short.

So once that happens you go rush Clyde’s house and attack his fortress to get the Stick back.  All in all I’ll skip all the attack details because it’s all fighting, but once you get to the room where Clyde is, a cutscene ensues where Clyde doesn’t know what the toxic chemicals from the alien spaceship do, because he just happens to have a barrel of it. Cartman, Stan, Kyle and Kenny all try to convince him to not do anything with the barrel which is wired up to ‘something’,  and Clyde flips the switch and you find out he went and dug up Chef’s grave and at this point, he’s a nazi zombie.

(In there somewhere you go into Mr. Slave’s ass to disarm a thermonuclear weapon too!)

So you fight Chef and he ends up exploding and the government busts into the  treehouse and the leader of the operation picks up the Stick of Truth… and in true South Park logic, the leader of operations thinks the Stick gives him universal power over everything, and reveals that you are Dovahkiin, and that the government wants you because of your ability to make friends on social networking websites so quickly, apparently. He offers you the chance to rule the world with him (keep in mind while he’s here at the moment he’s completely naked) but you stand firm with your friends. But Kenny goes to his side and gets turned into Nazi Zombie Kenny and you have to repeatedly kill him, but he keeps resurrecting himself because he’s a zombie. So Cartman tells you that you have to fart on his balls, and you do, and he blows up and turns everyone who is a nazi zombie back to normal and the credits roll.

There IS an extra after the credits.

END SPOILERS

The score for the story is 10/10, magnificent piece of work.

Graphics and Sound:

The graphics of the game are in true South Park style, to the T. The talking is also done down to a T just like South Park too, I.E. mouth movement etc. The characters are all wonderfully portrayed in their correct colors and sizes of course. And the soundtrack is a tiny bit repetitive but honestly you’re not gonna notice with all the areas they roll you through so quickly, so on that note the soundtrack is actually pretty decent. 8/10 but would not buy OST(Official SoundTrack)

8/10

Controls:

The controls for the game are really simple. I’ve heard talk of people having issues with button mashing areas of the game on PC and apparently the solution is to plug in an Xbox 360 controller, but I didn’t have any issues at all with it, just when the button mashing sequences caught me off guard, I usually failed them. But all in all the basic controls are pretty nice, just WASD and clicking for the turn based combat. Controls are 9/10, the only issue I really had was differentiating the foreground from the background sometimes while walking around which isn’t really a control issue I suppose but, oh well.

9/10

Overall Rating:

-DRUM ROLL-

9/10.

The story is fantastic, the controls are good, there’s no gamebreaking glitches (for me anyway), the sound is good, it’s all good. I’d definitely recommend giving this game a pickup and playing it for whatever platform.

Here’s the links to purchase it (Keep in mind you do have to select what platform you want it on!):

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