South Park: The Fractured But Whole

I've played enough licensed RPGs to know when a studio is coasting on brand recognition, and the first hour of The Fractured But Whole is genuinely nerve-wracking for that reason. Then Cartman reframes your entire origin story mid-cutscene for a cheap laugh, the grid-based combat clicks into place, and you realize this is the real thing. Ubisoft San Francisco took the relatively flat turn-based foundation of The Stick of Truth and rebuilt it as a tactical RPG, placing your four-character party on a combat grid where positioning, knockback angles, and enemy clustering matter as much as raw damage output. Each fight genuinely does feel like a small puzzle, especially once Time Fart abilities enter the picture: pausing time mid-battle to land a free hit, or rewinding an enemy's last move before it connects, adds a layer of improvisation that keeps the early-to-mid game lively. The class system is where the RPG credentials get a little wobbly. You start with broad archetypes - Speedster, Brutalist, Blaster - and unlock additional classes as the story progresses, eventually mixing and matching abilities from multiple kits for your New Kid build. On paper that sounds like genuine build variety. In practice, each class carries exactly three basic moves and one ultimate, and the move pools across classes start to feel samey around hour fifteen. Allies are even more constrained, with fixed ability sets that remove any party-composition creativity you might expect from a tactical game. The artifact system, which serves as your gear progression, leans cosmetic for clothing and functional only for equipped artifacts that raise your Might score - the metric gating story missions. It is a cleaner system than raw level-gating, but it also strips out the loot satisfaction that made exploration in The Stick of Truth feel rewarding. The writing is doing the heavy lifting, and for most of the runtime it holds up. The story sends the New Kid through a superhero civil war between Coon and Friends and the Freedom Pals - a Marvel Civil War parody that doubles as a very accurate satire of franchise IP squabbles and Netflix deals. Trey Parker and Matt Stone are fully present here: the voice cast, the animation fidelity to the show, the meta jokes about your character being silently complicit in increasingly unhinged scenarios. The game's infamous difficulty slider, which ties challenge to your chosen skin colour, is exactly the kind of uncomfortable satire the show is built on - it will land or it will not, depending on your tolerance for that register of comedy. What does genuinely grate is the filler content: fetch-adjacent side quests that pad the map without adding anything narratively interesting, and a collect-a-thon structure for certain completion tasks that feels like busywork dressed up in a superhero costume. For RPG players, the honest ceiling here is moderate. The combat is more interesting than anything you would find in a typical licensed action game, the writing rewards attention, and the production quality is genuinely impressive - the game looks and sounds indistinguishable from the show. But if you come in expecting deep build crafting, meaningful narrative choices, or the kind of systemic depth that holds up past forty hours, you will hit the wall around the two-thirds mark when combat encounters start cycling through familiar patterns. This is a 20-to-25 hour game that knows exactly what it is: a very well-executed comedy vehicle with a tactical RPG chassis bolted underneath. Fans of the show who bounced off The Stick of Truth's simpler combat will find this meaningfully better. Pure tactics fans without a South Park connection will find a competent but shallow system propped up by jokes.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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