The sequel to the epic South Park: The Stick of Truth is finally out with South Park: The Fractured But Whole. Once again taking on the role of South Park’s “new kid” you fight alongside The Coon and Friends & the Freedom Pals as the two factions vie for Netflix and original content supremacy.

South Park: The Fractured But Whole is a 2017 strategy RPG, it is developed and published by Ubisoft, it is available on PC, Playstation 4, and Xbox One.

The Coon & Friends rise.

After nearly a three year wait, the sequel to surprise hit The Stick of Truth is now available in gamer’s hands. This time around Matt Stone & Trey Parker put aside wizards and magic in favor of Superheroes. Featuring a much more fluid combat system compared to the previous game, the sequel does a lot to improve upon past issues, but there is a few small hiccups here and there.

South Park does a beautiful take on the over-saturated superhero genre.

THE GOOD: One of the many improvements of The Fractured But Whole is that it’s amazingly far more enjoyable than The Stick of Truth which felt at the time hard to top, and given the many delays the sequel suffered people were right to get a little worried. The new strategy like combat system has you traversing the map to position your character well enough to attack the nearest enemy or good enough of distance to set up a long range attack. Fart powers return but with improved abilities both in battle and for traversing the world map including one which let’s you continuously attack an opponent for a few seconds. You once again take on the role of the “New Kid”, while he/she kind of felt just there in most cases the last game they’re much more involved in the story this time around.

So much wrong in the typical right South Park kind of way.

The game’s story is just as you expect from the writers of South Park,  where as the boys attempt to do something which seems simply enough but becomes complex after being full of impossibilities. Whether it’s Crab People, mutated Sixth Graders, or Morgan Freeman teaching you how to craft, South Park: The Fractured But Whole’s story is chock-full of South Park’s trademark ridiculousness that’s kept it on air for a historic twenty-one years. The town of South Park feels much more open this time around compared to the previous game, and you’ll find yourself lost for hours doing every side bit and minor quest before wanting to eventually complete the main story, honestly even with the main story completed I’m still finding new stuff to do well past twenty or so hours in (post main story completed).

Matt and Trey tackle race issues the only way they know how in South Park: The Fractured But Whole.

Crafting, which felt like something planned but cut from the original game is the standard RPG affair. You combine a certain number of 1-3 items to create a more potent healing item, charm to raise your stats, or occasional mission item. It would have been nice if superhero costumes had armor effects like in the previous game, but it’s easy to see how that may have broken the game’s difficulty a tad. Customization was also severely improved from the last game with virtually everything from race to gender being customizable at will. Almost if not the entire roster of South Park characters have at least a minimal place within the game’s world, which was a missed opportunity in the previous entry.

Fight Raisins Girls and more in South Park: The Fractured But Whole.

THE BAD: Throughout my playthrough (pre-update) I experienced one and only one crash which caused me to relaunch the game. There’s also an awkward combat pause glitch which disables movement and although it only happened seldomly & doesn’t start until the latter parts of the game, it did happen more often than I cared for. Also while a large number of characters are featured here some, which should have had much larger roles for example the Goth Kids, felt like they should have had much bigger roles than a one or two off.

A great second attempt on South Park by Ubisoft that’s likely to be perfected on the eventual third.

OVERALL THOUGHTS: South Park has had a crazy journey as a far as licensed games go, from racers to turkey shooters and more there’s been some good and plenty of bad, but The Fractured But Whole is a near perfect representation of what developers and publishers should strive for a licensed game to be. Almost every aspect from the previous game is improved upon and the new additions never seemed as though they needed tweaks or reworks. There’s some occasional glitches, but they’re far and few between the hours of fun had throughout the game’s end run.