South Park: The Fractured But Whole review round up | What the critics are saying

The sequel to South Park: The Stick of Truth is out this week, and reviews are coming out thick and fast. South Park: The Fractured But Whole is getting largely positive reviews across the board, with the essence of most being that it is very much a South Park game.

It's taking much of the design from the original and beefing it up with a new story. It's an RPG game, using turn-based combat on a grid where you and your party are all superheroes, in a parody of Marvel's film franchises. Cartman, going by his superhero name The Coon, wants to get in on the superhero business with a three-stage plan of films, going into origin stories, and culminating in one huge blockbuster. Kenny, also known as Mysterion, disagrees, setting in motion a series of events not unlike Captain America: Civil War, albeit with a lot more farting and South Park storylines.

It is, by most accounts, a truly South Park game. Philip Kollar's review on Polygon opens with this, in fact, describing how this is a game that South Park fans will enjoy, and won't convert those who aren't already fans.

"Chances are you already know whether you’re going to enjoy South Park: The Fractured But Whole.

If you played 2014’s South Park: The Stick of Truth — a solid role-playing game spin on Comedy Central’s long-running animated series — then you know. Or if you’ve watched much of the cartoon the game is based on, then I assure you, you know. Forgive the cliche, but I’ve never reviewed a game that better deserves it: The Fractured But Whole is a game made for existing South Park fans. Those fans are going to eat it up, and those predisposed to hating the show aren’t going to be convinced by Ubisoft’s take on things.

Kollar goes on to describe how the game's combat can be fun, but lacks the depth that the systems are built for, if not for "another fight against half a dozen jerk sixth-graders." While Kollar awards the game a 7/10, it's clear the style isn't to everyone's taste, his conclusion being led by a title of "South park: The Fractured But Whole is just like the show, for all the good and bad that encompasses."

Colm Ahern, reviewing the game for VideoGamer.com, had some similar thoughts. He explains that battles feel longer than they should, while the Artifacts you obtain turn you into "a God-like character" to make fights just a bit too easy for his liking. Like Kollar, Ahern awarded the game a solid 7/10, with the following review synopsis. 

"The longer South Park: The Fractured But Whole went on, the less I laughed. Exploring the mountain town, however, is a delight, and the battles are a marked improvement on the original's combat."

A somewhat more positive review comes from Harry Shepherd on PCGamesN, where it's established early that Shepherd thinks that "South Park: The Fractured But Whole leaves its predecessor far behind."

Shepherd emphasises the vast array of things you can do in The Fractured But Whole, and how there's a lot of opportunity to mix and match what you're doing throughout the game, never truly locked into one repetitive cycle of moves.

"Each class is satisfyingly distinct: the Speedster calls upon his pace to move around the grid with ease, buzzing around foes to deal light damage or heal allies. The Blaster, on the other hand, keeps their distance as they whittle down enemy health bars, with the Brutalist preferring to get up close and personal."

Crediting much of this to South Park creators (and contributors to the game) Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the attention to detail in the game makes it "a treat to see your impact on the world integrated dynamically into combat," with aspects like jokes from side missions coming back while you play.

Across the board, South Park: The Fractured But Whole is seeing similar scores and criticisms. Miguel Concepcion gave it a strong 8/10 at Gamespot, but noted the "lack of [the] series' deep-cutting satire", Dan Stapleton saw it as "consistently funny" but felt puzzles got repetitive on IGN, and Phil Hornshaw gave one of the lowest scores for The Fractured But Whole on Digital Trends, 5/10, nothing that "tired, obvious jokes" fill the game.

South Park The Factured But Whole Where to buy

South Park: The Fractured But Whole currently comes out at a round 80/100 on Metacritic (with a user score of 8.4, which will surely shift and change as the game releases) and 83/100 on OpenCritic. The critics aren't quite unanimous, but there's definitely common threads throughout reviews: South Park: The Fractured But Whole does a lot of South Park-y things, and whether that's to your taste or not is up to you, but it does do that well and is an improvement on The Stick of Truth in many ways.