South Park: The Stick of Truth is what a south park game should be. The entire time when I was watching the demo, I was floored at just how close to the show everything looked. It’s actually so good that you could have told me that it was an episode of the show, until the button icons showed up.
Anyway, you take the role as the new kid and start off by taking down Cartman’s evil regime. The whole game takes place on these 2d areas that recreate the look of the show flawlessly. You can loot trash cans for items and use various weapons while running around. One of the items was the slingshot and it was used to puncture something in the environment to create a path. Other weapons you can use are various fart based powers because 4th graders. You can charge up and then lob farts that explode wherever they land. The person showing off the demo looked to be having some issues with aiming them though.
If you run into another kid on the main area, you’ll go into a battle with them but these battles can be avoided by using weapons before they get to you. The battles themselves are turned based and in this demo Butters was tagging along with you. There were a couple different weapons to choose from as well as skills and magic to try out. When you choose an attack there are different button prompts used to perform the skill and, if done well, do more damage. In that way it is very similar to both the Paper Mario and Mario and Luigi RPG series’.
Even exploring the world was done in a similar manner to Paper Mario. There looked to be a decent amount of treasures to find but all the areas were kind of small and, because of the great art direction, hard to tell what was important or not. I’m sure that is something that will be easy to get used to though.
Also in the world was a character that needed to be rescued. Then they friended you on Facebook upon the rescue. I was told that these Facebook friends will increase your abilities and allow you to unite different factions. The whole menu system and equipment screens had a Facebook like style to them as well.
I liked all of what I saw but it was such a small portion that I’m not sure if this will be great or just good. One thing that was spot on was the humor. It felt perfectly like South Park.
If all goes well South Park: The Stick of Truth will be a very solid RPG set in South Park. At the very least it is refreshing to see an RPG in such a unique setting. South Park: The Stick of Truth is set to be released later this year on PS3, Xbox 360, and PC.
