Recent reviews by Smartass Birb

South Park: The Stick of Truth is a great game.

The story was without of doubt the best aspect of the game. Your created character and your family move to South Park and you have to make some new friends. You end up taking part in a fantasy roleplaying game with some other kids led by Cartman, who plays as a knockoff of Gandalf from Lord of the Rings. They are protecting an item called the Stick of Truth, which is literally just a stick, but allows the wielder to control the universe. But it gets stolen and Cartman suspects the elves, their rivals, of taking it. But through a series of events, you learn that it was actually taken by a third-party. And so the humans and elves team up to reclaim the Stick of Truth. The plot has a lot of funny moments that you would expect from the South Park crew. Without spoiling much, in one point in the game, you have to cross the border to Canada. Then the gameplay completely changes from a side-scrolling style to a top-down style with some 8-bit music. And when you finish everying you have to do, the music changes to an 8-bit version of Blame Canada, an award-winning song from the movie South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.

The gameplay takes pages from other RPGs and spoofs them. Two of the major gameplay elements are ripped straight from the Elder Scrolls series: The class system and dragon shouts from Skyrim. You can choose between warrior, mage, thief, and a fourth class called Jew. Each class has its own set of attacks and abilities for you to master. The "dragonshouts" are actually farting. You'll learn different farting skills as you progress through the game. While required outside of battle and for achievements, you don't really need them to defeat enemies. Though during major boss battles, you'll be given QTEs for your farting to fully defeat them.

As for the technical aspect, the game is locked at 30 FPS, which isn't really a problem considering the whole game is animated by the original South Park team. So it's like you're playing an episode of the show. The game has support for controller and keyboard/mouse. However, I've encountered a bug using my keyboard/mouse, so I ended up using a controller to play the game. Your experience may differ.

I do have a couple of problems with the gameplay. The game has a levelling system, but it's capped at level 15. When you level, you get to upgrade your abilities. But you won't be able to fully upgrade all of them, which forces you to pick and choose which abilities to fully upgrade. If you do your sidequests, you can get a few summons which will aid you in battle, but they're honestly useless. Not in terms of power (their attacks are absurdly OP), but in terms of accessibility. You can only use them once per day (the whole game spans a whopping total of 3 days) and you can't use them against bosses.

One last thing to note, in European versions of the game, certain parts of the game are completely censored and skipped because I guess even M-rated games can't get away with anything over there. I have to dock points off for that out of principle because censorship protects ignorance, not innocence.

Here's my tl;dr Pro & Con List:

PROS
-Quality storytelling
-Fun gameplay and battle mechanics
-Epic music
-Absolutely hilarious

CONS
-Low level cap
-Useless summons
-Censorship (Europe only)

OVERALL: A solid RPG.

The ambitious sequel to the innovative arcade game by Don Bluth and his team. The squeaky eye-candy princess Daphne has been kidnapped by the evil Mordroc, who apparently wants to marry her for some unknown reason. While the entire first game took place in the castle, in this one, you travel through 6 different timelines by using a unique flying time machine.

Another change is this game plays more like an interactive movie; inputing the correct commands to progress through the level as it goes. I am not entirely sure what the difficulty was on the first game, but this one is pretty difficult, especially when you turn off the move guides which serve as the game's training wheels. Then you have to solely rely on the yellow flashes to figure out what direction to go or when to use your sword. To make matters worse, except in the first level, if you mess up, you will restart to the beginning of the level. So you'll need good memorization skills in order to succeed, especially when turning off the move guide to get two achievements.

There are also treasures hidden in each level, which flash yellow when you're nearby. Input the correct direction to obtain the item. You have to collect all the treasures before reaching the final level or else the game will make you restart at the level(s) where you missed them. So overall, this game is a big step-up from the first one; the animation is improved in glorious Don Bluth style, the levels are distinctive to each other, and an increase in difficulty. If you played Dragon's Lair or any laser disc arcade game before, or you are a fan of Don Bluth movies (like me), or you just want a challange, I highly recommend this game.