South Park: The Fractured But Whole Review - IGN (2024)

By a wide margin, South Park: The Fractured But Whole is the funniest roleplaying game since South Park: The Stick of Truth came out three years ago. This one’s gags are focused more on parodying the superhero movie franchise craze than RPG mechanics, which makes it feel a little less novel, but this time its turn-based tactical combat is also deep enough to stand on its own.

The story starts somewhat slowly, with your custom-made New Kid and the boys transitioning abruptly from the final moments of The Stick of Truth’s fantasy-themed battles to a superhero-themed quest to find a missing cat for a $100 reward. It’s a cynical take on childhood roleplaying, of course, because Cartman plans to use that cash to jumpstart the equivalent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe based around his Batman-like Coon character and become rich off the movie and merchandising rights. But after a few hours it spirals into signature South Park absurdity, and you’re fighting everything from Professor Chaos’ minions to Crab People. Granted, The Fractured But Whole makes few new jokes of its own, preferring instead to riff off of fan-pleasing material as it’s adapted to game form, but it does it well – it even makes killing Kenny funny again.

While it’s mostly absurd, the kids’ superhero fantasy is actually a little touching in places. Jimmy, who walks with crutches, has super-speed powers, and the developmentally disabled Timmy’s Professor X-like mental abilities make him so overpowered you can’t play as him in battle. It’s nice that there’s some positivity there among the obliviously racist (The Coon, The Human Kite) and sexual jokes, and much of it is genuinely hilarious. There were just a handful of times where a throwaway racial stereotype joke didn’t quite feel clever enough to justify the sensitive subject matter.

For pure shock-value firepower, nothing in The Fractured But Whole had me reeling quite as much as The Stick of Truth’s zombie Nazi fetuses. That said, it still delivers its share of the “Wow, they went there” moments that have kept South Park relevant. A scene with fourth graders in a strip club (gross for largely non-sexual reasons, surprisingly), a priest self-flagellating with a rosary made from anal beads, and some more-racist-than-racist cops stand out.

There are some excellent touches, like each member of the party having specific lines of banter dialogue for each other potential member of the party. That’s something you rarely see outside of a BioWare game. It also has numerous unique animations to pick up on, such as when Token fills his Tupperware helmet with vomit when he’s grossed out (aka poisoned).

In the menus, The Fractured But Whole takes an interesting approach to character development. You start with one superhero archetype but later can freely mix and match your four-power loadout with abilities from other classes. Instead of a straight level-up system, you slot in gathered artifact items to increase your power level and stats. It creates some interesting scenarios where I wanted to keep some lower-level items slotted in order to maintain a big bonus to knockback damage or ultimate ability recharge rate. More importantly, it makes the New Kid a Swiss army knife who can adapt as needed to support the other three heroes on your team. He gradually felt less like my character as Cartman grudgingly unlocked more powers, but being able to freely customize his look with gathered costume pieces helped. You can even change your gender, courtesy of Mr. Mackey’s aggressively awkward counseling sessions.

The same goes for the ultimate ability animations, which are awesome and hilarious the first few times but long and unskippable later on. Watching Cartman fantasize about Coon movie posters and being on Inside The Actor’s Studio before shredding enemies or Kyle fire up a massive power drill takes about 10 seconds each time, which doesn’t sound like a lot but gets annoying when you’re trying to finish off some sixth graders. Getting variety here is some incentive to change out your four-person team and your character’s powers every so often.

There’s also a crafting system for some reasons, but it feels almost entirely superfluous. If you’re gathering stuff – and you will be gathering a lot of it – you’ll always have enough of the basic ingredients you’ll need to craft whatever healing items you like. For half of the campaign, I was maxed out at 999 of the basic materials. The exception is the rare key ingredients, such as tortillas for healing burritos and quesadillas, which I usually had to buy from vendors like Morgan Freeman. So why not just buy the healing items instead?

On the technical glitch side, I did hit several instances where the game became unresponsive after returning from suspend and I had to force-quit and restart it, but negligible progress was lost.