"Don't ask why Kenny decided to be a chick, it just seems to be the way he's rolling right now." South Park Stick of Truth is a role-playing video game developed by Obsidian Entertainment in collaboration with South Park Digital Studios, published by Ubisoft. Story Stick of Truth is set in the fictional town of South Park in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, location where most of the action of a show takes place. You play as a New Kid, who as name suggests, just moved into South Park with his parents. He quickly joins local kids in live action role playing game featuring humans and elves fighting over legendary Stick of Truth, twig that possesses unlimited power. Gameplay SoT is played from 2.5 D third person perspective, as our hero ventures all over South Park (and Canada!) to complete quests, defeat evil, gather loot and level up. The usual RPG duties. Gameplay can be cut into multiple pieces, with one being overall exploration of the areas, other focused on turn based combat and last revolving around improving your character and managing his inventory. But first, quick character creator with tutorial that will teach you combat basis and make you pick an archetype you stick with throughout the game. Once the game opens up you get to travel across town with few locations being locked until you reach certain moment in the story or until you get a certain ability. In areas you can visit right away, you will meet well known characters with unique quests, encounter enemies ready to battle, and gather a ton of different loot, together with your buddy who will accompany you in and out of combat! While town ain't massive, you can discover and utilize fast travel points to move from one place to another even faster. For your victories in fights and completing quests you receive experience points, gathering enough grants you a level up allowing you to use items with certain level restrictions, plus gives you a skill point to upgrade your abilities. And you gather cash, ready to be exchanged for different items in local merchant stores. Besides these, during your journey you gather friends! On Facebook. Virtual one. Collecting enough gives you an option to unlock permanent perks, so it's worth bothering everyone you can. There are also Chinpokomons scattered everywhere serving as collectible waiting to be picked up. Combat! As mentioned before, it's turn based, with first turn going to whoever initiated it. So smacking enemies first is a good move. Turn based means both parties perform sets of actions one after another. Your party-their party-you-them and so on until one side is defeated. During your turn you can choose if you want to use a support (consumable) item or move straight into your own class depending abilities or weapons (as you have both melee and ranged options) to perform an attack. Abilities cost Power Points called PP, while magic fart attacks require mana. If you did quests for right characters, you get to summon them in combat for powerful attacks that instantly end it. But don't worry, you cannot use them during boss fights! It would be a bit too easy. Worth mentioning your buddies have special abilities you can utilize in same action as a support item, meaning they can still attack afterwards. Timing is key when using weapons as all of them feature flashy icons where hitting a button at a right time deals critical damage. Same works when you are in defence, as you can time your blocks to neglect taken damage. With abilities you have to follow the instructions and perform certain button mashup sequence. Game allows you often to use environment to deal with enemies without engaging in combat. Be on a lookout for anything shiny, as a open source of flame or something hanging loose on a wall can deal with your opponents. New Kid throughout his journey utilizes 2 different weapons, melee and ranged, can equip 3 outfit parts (gloves/chest/head), plus multiple purely cosmetic items, from makeup to beards. You can enhance statistics of your weapons and outfits by using patches and "strap-ons", increasing damage dealt or adding effects such as bleeding. Playtime and replayability Full playthrough with decent time spend on exploration took me 11 hours. Sadly there is no reason to dive into a game again as classes don't differ much in combat, and most of the sections doesn't shock as much as in the first go. Pros and cons South Park Stick of Truth is fantastic, especially if you are a fan of the show. Option to explore this iconic town, meet well known characters, appreciate consistent aesthetic so you can feel like whole game is just one big episode, it's remarkable! You add to that humour, jokes, references, social commentary, whole satire about Role Playing Fantasy genre aspect mixed with classic shocking, fearless moments one knows SP for to create an absolute gem. While still being appreciated by people who are not that familiar with the show, you will miss out on some reference or an inside joke here and there. The game does drop a ball a bit in other departments. Combat is shallow and even with rather short game lenght, becomes a repetitive chore in latter half of it. It's not challenging thanks to powerful summons, ton upon ton of different items you can use, and just as strong buddies plus features a lot of repetitive animations. On the other hand quite sized arsenal of weapons and especially over-the-top abilities you can use create fun, even if one-sided encounters in which you blow enemies out of the water while soaking in absurdity of said encounters. To the bad bag I throw in button inputs/prompts/instructions on screen which quite often are wrong. So you can pick an ability, attempt to do as it states and fail miserably, wasting an action. Some buddies for me were pretty much useless due to that fact, and certain story-related clinic moment in game forced me to look up on google on what proper instructions are to beat it. Very...weird issue, I don't even know what is a cause of it. Read claims it's an issue with keyboard and that game should be played on a controller but I'm just mentioning what happened to me. Lack of any post-game content, especially considering how much happens throughout the storyline is a negative surprise too. Even with those few mishaps, I still had a great time with Stick of Truth. As someone who seen few episodes here and there but doesn't have time nor interest to dive into 20-or-how-many-seasons-are-there of South Park, this wild ride was a pleasure to experience and just enough of SP for me. Final words and conclusion Worth mentioning game has censorship applied in certain countries due to abortion and nazi images, replaced with pictures and description of what happens during a censored moment so um...don't be surprised if you get one. South Park Stick of Truth has all the charm and humour of the show blended well with decent gameplay it provides, creating a fantastic parody of fantasy RPG genre worth checking out. Feel free to check out [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/31947302/] my curator page for more reviews!
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