You fight two giant overweight characters, including a massive, scantily clad black stripper who uses her butt as a weapon, in back to back sequences.
“The Fractured but Whole” frustrates, however, when it feels like Parker and Stone are just aiming wildly without much thought. No matter what gender pronoun you choose, you’ll get attacked by rednecks who “don’t want your kind around here.” When the game feels culturally relevant and satirical, it can be as smart and funny as the show is at its best. The writers play with issues of race and gender throughout, even reaching a point where you gain an advantage in combat if you hear a “microaggression” and attack at just that moment. Your back-story even gets developed as the game progresses, although it always comes back to the horrific day that, as Cartman puts it, “your dad f**ked your mom.” A lot was made of the fact that your character’s skin tone changes as you increase the difficulty level-in other words, the game is harder if you’re black than if you’re white-which is clever although, like so much of the game, underdeveloped. The bulk of the game consists of story missions that allow you to carve out your own character with various special powers, costumes, and even elements like weakness and ethnicity. You play as “The New Kid,” a silent observer to the chaos going down in South Park, most of it led by Eric Cartman’s Coon as he battles Butters’ Professor Chaos. And I loved the guy waiting at a bus stop for a bus that "should have been there in December," a meta-reference to how many times this game has been delayed. But, for the most part, it works straight as a South Park variation on a superhero RPG.
At times, the game will cleverly make a reference to all of it being in the kids’ imaginations, such as when you’re fighting in the street and everything has to pause for a car coming through like Wayne and Garth playing hockey in “Wayne’s World,” or when adults and other kids look at you funny. “The Fractured but Whole” picks up the narrative of the last story, in which the kids of South Park are basically LARP-ing an elaborate story of superheroes and diabolical villains.
Trey Parker is the main creative voice behind “TFBW” and he’s taking no prisoners. There are some set-pieces that feel unrefined and jokes that hit the floor, and those easily offended should definitely play another game this holiday season. It can be riotously funny and undeniably clever, while also delivering as a pure gaming experience, particularly in a very addictive combat gameplay mechanic.
Much like the show, which can be very inconsistent, the peaks of “The Fractured but Whole” are very high. The game follows up the surprisingly critically and commercially successful “The Stick of Truth” and delivers much of the same blend of “South Park” comedy with elements familiar to fans of role-playing games.
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