Along with this, the nostalgic humor is what makes this a must buy for any South Park fan. Between looking in characters’ closets and exploring the newly mapped out South Park, the player will find hundreds of references to the show and film. Plus, some of these references are pretty deep; I consider myself a devoted South Park fan and even I had to look up a few. On top of this, some are so minute that they could be easy to miss; for instance, in the movie theater Damien or Satan’s son from Season one could be seen in the last row. It is this great care that the developers took that makes me ‘sort of forget’ the problems with the overall product.
Now, this care can also be seen with the graphics; though it does not break new technological ground it still looks amazing. While the past games never looked like South Park, The Stick of Truth captures the look and charm of the small Colorado town. ‘The construction paper look’ may seem easy to replicate, but it took years of painstaking work to get this show-like detail.
The amazing graphics look exactly like the show.
While exploring the open world, the two-dimensional appearance works perfectly with the fixed camera, however, this aspect is where more problems arise. While the overall graphics work, there are constant problems while exploring. Now, the town is broken up into sections that have brief loading times; and it seems that the Playstation 3’s hardware could not process the size of the town with these said load times. So as the player enters new sections there are occasional frame-rate slowdowns. While it is only a minor problem at the beginning, as the player progresses the frame-rate slowdown becomes elongated and quite distracting: sometime lasting for the entire time I was in a specific section of the map.
On top of this, the overall load times are quite ridiculous. Yes, most games have load times, but the amount of time it takes to load a small portion of the map is infuriating and distracting. These load times are annoying when compared to a recent game like Grand Theft Auto V: which has a larger map, more realistic graphics, and a quarter of the load times. But even with this gripe, it is extremely exciting to explore this South Park world; for the first time the show’s creators mapped out the entire town of South Park. And seeing things like Mr. Hanky’s home, crab people, and the look of Canada further prove that a lot of care was taken with this game.
Mr. Hankey’s cameo.
But again, it is important to point that South Park: The Stick of Truth is full of glitches; though I was thoroughly disappointed each time it was delayed, I think this game needed a few more months of development. Instead, it feels like it was rushed by the publisher, which at the same time, is understandable because it already took several years to develop and had three aforementioned delays. But with rushing the game, the developers missed several bugs: like characters unexplainably gliding, instead of doing the signature South Park walk. Also, there are two cut-scenes that had pop-in textures or objects missing. For instance, the abortion scene had the operation table missing and Randy floating in the air. Last, during the third act the weapon screens or attack menus are noticeably fuzzy and blurry.
Now, as much as I am complaining about this, South Park: The Stick of Truth is the game that the fans have been waiting for; and again, the humor and nostalgia alone was worth the $60 price tag. However, this did not make me completely forget the stale gameplay, infuriating mechanics, and graphical glitches. But I am inclined to give this a higher score than it deserves, because it is a great South Park story-line. Between hearing the Chi-Pokemon sound when finding those collectibles and doing fetch quests for the simple but impressionable town-folk, South Park is more fun than it should be. Several reviewers say that they ‘recommend this game but with a huge asterisk’ and I am inclined to agree with that.
Finally, it is important to point out that I played the Playstation 3 version and I do not know if the frame rate slowdowns and glitches appear on the other platforms.
7/10