The Good
- the puzzles are much better. some of the uses of the special powers are very clever.
- the jokes are pretty good. I like how they updated the Jared news that he was a pedophile.
- I'm glad they have a Kenny costume. Since your character is mute, the costume is actually a perfect fit.
- the grid system is actually really nice. It adds a lot of depth to the game. The way the enemies move force you to equip the correct moves, and also put your team in the best position to maximize the efficiency of your moves.
- there are a number of fights where your objective is to try and escape, which involves getting to specific squares. This added a cool dynamic to the fight. In shub niggurath you had to punch enemies into the boss, which made the objective not to kill but how to reposition. These type of fights made the combat interesting and diverse.
- the combat starts off slow, but as you gain more abilities the depths of the battle system will start to shine. And the way the developers designed it was really good, in terms of the pacing.
- the Quick Time inputs for attacks is a nice welcome just like in stick of Truth.
- the South park games really make good use of jokes that are in the show. This is probably one of the best TV show or movie game adaptation I've seen.
- the passive dialogue the characters say during combat and randomly while you're exploring is actually quite unique, and it does make the world really organic, considering the simplicity of South Park's visuals and the identical features each character have.
The Bad
- wish I could move the screen around freely just to recon
- I don't like the focus on the whole social media craze. The whole coonstagram thing is overdoing it, with selfies and everything. Maybe I'm just too old school.
- the game's difficulty is too easy for the first half of the game. I had to keep myself under level almost 50% for the difficulty to be just right. The combat is actually well-designed, but without the difficulty the depth of the combat is useless. I almost gave up on the game because I thought the combat was going to be trash, but I'm glad I stuck with the game. Things don't get good until past the first half, when you get all the abilities.
- the camera angle makes it hard to see exactly which Square enemies are in some fights. This usually depends on the art of the enemy. If there's a big enemy beside of a small at 1, it'll be hard to see if the smaller one is right beside him or square away. E.g. mutated 6th graders fights.
- the turn bar disappears when enemies have their turn, which disrupts my plan for my next move. This is costly for difficult boss fights.
- I don't know if it's just the switch version, but the loading times are quite long. Even between seemingly basic screen transitions in the overworld. It's not like the game needs to load a lot of polygons, it's South park for crying out loud.
- the button shortcuts to select attacks can be confusing since they keep changing when you want to swap between them during battle. Especially if you're more used to the Xbox or PlayStation controllers. But it is a really good system if you are used to the switch controller button layout.
- there's a small issue with the human kite ability puzzles sometimes. There are moments where you need to open up a new path before summoning the human kite, but the game doesn't tell you that. I ended up constantly dying from using the ability not because I was missing the timing, but it was because I didn't open that New path yet. This caused a lot of confusion.
Conclusion
Despite so many negative points, the combat design made the whole experience awesome. Though you must give the game some time, so you have access to more abilities for the gameplay to really be fully fleshed out.