The brilliant South Park humor is here, but the battle system leaves much to be desired.

User Rating: 7 | South Park: The Fractured But Whole PS4

All the South Park humor is certainly here and it feels like you are playing in a direct episode or in this case, maybe a long movie. This game certainly is worth a play through if you are a fan of the franchise, but at the end of the day, the battle system felt more like a chore more than anything. The most die-hard of fans would probably enjoy this more if it was in fact a movie.

The battle system honestly has taken a step back from The Stick of Truth. While the SOT had a simplistic, more traditional turned based battle system, it worked and while perhaps some felt SOT was too easy, it certainly wasn't tedious to say the least. This battle system is quite tedious. You move the characters around on squares for each turn and depending on what square they are on, they can only hit certain enemies and in certain squares they can avoid enemy attacks.

OK but what is really annoying is if your party member is in your way, you can't even attack at all or you have to keep switching certain attacks until the games tells you you can hit an enemy with this certain attack. It almost felt like you almost had to play roulette with your characters moves until you could find one where your character would have enough range to attack. It's annoying when some battles at times felt like a guessing game rather than being more strategic because it takes several hours to get used to this system while the SOT's felt more inviting.

It was cool that you can now use 4 characters per battle in FBW this time around rather than 2 characters so the battles do have more variety, that is certainly a good thing. Also after enough practice, the battles do have some strategic elements like knocking enemies into each other or needing to attack certain objects in the battle arena to unlock the character's weakness.

Overall this is another fun SP experience and it does share similar elements to it's predecessor like some side quests and plenty of more farting elements added to both the battles and out side of battle. Plus the dialogue is quite witty and it has every SP character you can imagine including the newest ones from just a season ago. However as an RPG, this is an average game at best and once you play-through it all, it's unlikely to have much replay value. Most people will want to get to the end to see how the story concludes, not because they are killing it with the gameplay here.