South Park: The Stick of Truth was ground breaking back when it came out a decade ago. At a time where licensed games were still a very common thing, and their quality was almost always abysmal, and then here comes this South Park game that looks exactly like an episode of the show, written and directed by the actual guys behind the show, and to top it off, it was actually fun to play. You couldn't really name a lot of games like that. But this was 10 years ago, where does this game stand in today's day and age?

The most glaring thing about the game is its age. They directly reference the date at multiple points throughout the game, and a lot of cultural references from the time didn't last and really age the game. These don't ruin the game, but they take me out of the experience occasionally. But when they're not putting the date up on a wall or talking about early 2010 celebrities, South Park's signature humour shines through. It's not for everyone, they go for blatant shock humour, and push the line wherever possible, and while honestly it's not my favourite, there's a lot of charming writing and clever dialogue that doesn't have to revolve around toilet humour. All of the call backs to South Park's rogues gallery are a treat, the entire Canada segment is hilarious, and every single location is stuffed to the brim with easter eggs and clever gags that makes every screen feel like a Where's Waldo page. If you haven't watched the show, and don't remember much from the time period, there's still something here for you, but you'll miss out on a large majority of this game's charm.

Now, on the gameplay side, the game is divided into 2 distinct portions, overworld exploration, and combat. We'll tackle combat first. You get to pick between 4 classes, the warrior, with high physical damage, the thief, who specialises in attacking the backline and inflicting status effects, the mage, who is blatantly the best class in the game, with massive AOE damage, and the jew, who is just the mage but a bit weaker. Basic combat is styled like the Mario and Luigi series, with timing button prompts making hits hit harder and your opponents hits weaker. Its really simple, but it keeps combat engaging, and manages to be simple enough to ensure it isn't tedious by the ending. The game never really gets difficult, the ability to stack DOT effects and spam healing items makes it pretty impossible to lose, but the game is short and simple by design. Balance is not the game's strong suit, you can pretty easily settle into the same strategy for every fight, making a lot of options feel pointless, the mana system is made totally pointless with PP regenerating after every fight and being a lot more effective, and combat often ends withing 1 or 2 turns tops. Overall, its fun for the short campaign, but has a lot of flaws, and makes repeat playthroughs a bit tedious.

On the other hand, overworld exploration has a lot more going on. You've got 8 different abilities you can use to traverse the overworld, with a lot of different methods to solve puzzles and complete quests, often having multiple solutions to reward thinking outside of the box. Between damaging the environment, teleporting around, shrinking into small areas, interacting with NPCs, and more, the overworld is incredibly dynamic, with things constantly changing throughout the game, and an almost metroidvania design, with a lot of treasure being awarded for going to early areas of the game with your new abilities. Honestly, I think this is my favourite aspect of the game. Collecting all of the costumes and weapons, and getting every friend in the game is a lot of fun, and makes completing this game 100% pretty fun, as long as you're paying attention in the areas you can't come back to.

Overall, I had fun coming back to the game. It has it's problems, but for the South Park guys' first real foray into game development, I think they did a pretty good job. The game is short and sweet, you can knock it out in just under 8 hours if you just focus the main quest, and the game being pretty cheap, especially during sales, I think its definitely worth checking out if you're a fan of the series. If this is your first time with the series, its not a bad introduction by any means, but you'll miss out on a majority of what the game has to offer, maybe start by binge watching a season or two.

el mejor juego de toda la puta vida, si sacan mas me los compro sin pensar

Balls