South Park: The Stick of Truth

I was intrigued by what the South Park game would offer. I assumed some whimsical adult humour that would keep me entertained for a good few hours along with an original story and expected level of ridiculousness. I got the latter two but not the first one.

South Park: The Stick of Truth sees you fill the shoes of douchebag, the new kid in South Park as he starts making friends and hanging out with all your favourite characters from the show. At first, it appears that it’s all to get your dad’s approval but it later revealed that you inevitably get caught up in the epic battle for the Stick of Truth, a stick that has the power to control the universe.

The reality, the Stick of Truth is just the central item to the kids’ game as they LARP around the town playing elves versus humans... or Kyle versus Cartman. The story itself is ridiculous and I stopped paying attention as soon as douchebag got abducted by aliens and anally probed. The story is about as pointless as a chocolate teapot as a driving influence for the game.

The sound effects and music work for about four, maybe five hours before it starts to wear thin and I think this works on the same grounds as the episodes – you wouldn’t watch a single episode of South Park over and over again for four hours. You would get bored. And that sums up the music and filler dialogue present through the game.

As I’ve said time and time again, the game play can make or break a game and The Stick of Truth is very middling, although lots of people would disagree. It’s an RPG with turn based combat where you can pick one of four classes at the beginning and your abilities that develop throughout the game are based on the class you pick. You cannot learn all the abilities to maximum level which kind of limits what you can do and making the wrong choice can make the game insanely difficult. On the flip side, you can also become overpowered – which is what I did by playing as a Jew.

Based on what I’ve said above, you can imagine me not being thrilled about having to do a second playthough but more on that in the next section...

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

 This is where the fun really begins. It is possible to get all 50 achievements in one playthrough using tactical saves which if you enjoy constant jokes about poo and farts then all of the stuff I’ve said above doesn’t really matter. However I got about 10 hours in before I realised I was going to need a second playthough and a second playthough makes all of the jokes and music all the more unbearable.

The last achievement I got was for getting through the entire game without ending any battles with your buddies ‘dead.’ I ended a battle with a dead buddy after about 10 minutes of play and didn’t clock that I’d failed this achievement.

There are so many missable achievements for doing a variety of different things. Some of them involve having to collect everything, like becoming everyone’s friend and collecting all of the chinpokomon scattered throughout the town. Some areas become blocked off after a while (like the alien spaceship) and there is also a point of no return which makes both of these missable.

Others missable achievement involve you having to do one-time actions. One such action involved you having to shrink and go up a character’s ass and then summon said character to help you in a battle. Another, and this is one of my personal favourites, is for farting on the corpse of dead Nazi Zombie fetus (aptly named Too Far). You also have to watch your in-game parents have sex for 60 seconds, which is wrong on so many levels.

I could go on and on about the different missables but we will be here all day if I do. More than half the achievements are missable and while some of these are because of the point of no return, most of them aren’t and will require you to do something specific at some point in the game. I fully recommend a guide if you are planning on the 100% completion.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I guess the summary is if you really like the average South Park episodes, you will definitely enjoy this game, however if you can’t rewatch episodes it’s not recommended and will grate on you before the end. I’ll confess that I found it semi enjoyable but not for the whole game. It also doesn’t have any replay value either but that’s just my opinion.