South Park tore its way into television after starting as
five minute short of immature obscenities as Santa and Jesus went
to battle. It was humorous, albeit tasteless. After making its mark
on Comedy Central, it's only fitting to see South Park infiltrate its
way to PC.
Acclaim has wrapped its Turok2 engine into this alien
mutant, buttkicking first person shooter. The engine is very
underused with South Park. This results in mixed ideas. First off,
South Park is a 2D cartoon and by harnessing very little of the
features of the engine, it creates a 3D game that's true to the
cartoon. On the second hand, this means your eye candy is
limited to a handful effects and your levels are pretty
uninteresting. Enemies are very limited. Turkeys will populate the
first stage, with an intermixing of cows. Stage 2 is filled with
clones while Stage 3 is more cows interspersed with aliens. While
the characters are very fitting to the nature of the show, the lack of
variety makes it a little uninteresting. Levels are also very bland. I
like the way they brought the town of South Park into the game.
The houses are colorful and pretty interesting. Unfortunately,
you're seldom in town, usually out in the middle of nowhere with
bland rocks, snow, and mountains.
Since this is South Park, audio plays heavily into the
game. It's full of one liners which are humorous the first ten or so
times, but they do tend to grow on you. The cutscenes are
probably the best part of the game. The boys get their mission
assignment from Chef. The cutscenes are funny and feel like part
of the TV show. Other than the speech, the audio is mediocre. My
roommate threatened to kill me if he heard any more turkeys, so I
was forced to resort to headphones for most of stage one. Since
there's a real lack of different types of monsters, there's really a
lack in the amount of noises. The weapons sound decent, but
nothing real spectacular.
Gameplay is pretty boring. It boils down to following a
linear path while being attacked by hundreds of mindless
enemies. Now it does change up a little bit, like where you're
killing hundreds of minions in order to stop them from destroying
the town. These levels have you in a pretty closed space where
the enemies come to you. Not really any more interesting than
trying to make your way from point A to point B like the other
levels. At the end of each stage, you will have to defeat a boss.
Bosses follow the idea that they have a weak point and that's the
only place you can damage them. With the semi-ineffective
weapons you're given, this takes a long, long, long time to defeat
the bosses.
Control is as good as any FPS, so not really much to say
in this category. Level design is very bland, forcing you to go in
one direction through a board (or should I say bored?). Weapons
are, shall we say, interesting. The normal weapon is a snowball,
adding a dodgeball, toilet plunger, nerf gun, and cow launchers
among other things. Each weapon has two firemodes, one normal
and one special. The special are more powerful, but are slower. It
makes the weapons more interesting. I liked the toilet plunger gun
the most, the triple fire special firemode makes short work of most
baddies.
Multiplayer is South Park's only redeeming quality. It's a
helluva lot of fun. Lots of flying snowballs and flying insults. Turok2
engine performs very well over a dialup connection and
multiplayer lets you choose from twenty characters from South
Park. This makes for some really entertaining multiplayer battles.
Alas, multiplayer and cool cutscenes isn't enough to
save this game. It's too uninteresting and plays too much as a very
mindless shooter. Think of it as a modern day space invaders. You
just keep killing enemies over and over and over. If you're a
diehard South Park fan, this should give you some giggles for a
little while, but even then it's stretching anyone's patience.
If you're looking for a good multiplayer FPS, and don't
mind paying full game prices, South Park might work for you. If
South Park would have been marketed as a discount game, it
might deserve a look, but I can't see anyone buying this to play the
single player game. As I delete this from my hard drive, I have one
last thought. "Oh my god, I killed Kenny!"
Highs: cool cutscenes, can be funny to a point, great
multiplayer Lows: boring and repetitive, mindless.
A couple of years ago my friends and I were sitting
around watching television when one of them whipped out a ratty
looking VHS tape. He said "Hey check this out, its pretty funny."
We put it in and were subjected to one of the funniest animated
shorts I had ever seen. This five minute short featured four
loud mouth kids, Santa Claus, and Jesus. We were all surprised
when the show turned into a Comedy Central series and became
the next Simpsons. After watching about three episodes of the
show I realized something, every episode was the same. There
really isn’t any originality. Just a couple of catch phrases and a
fart joke every thirty seconds. When I heard they were making a
first person game I thought that maybe they would inject
something new into the mix. They didn’t.
The game mixes many of the reoccurring themes of the
movie into one giant mess. You play as any of the four kids from
the show and your mission is to defend South Park from invading
alien clones. You are given a broad assortment of weapons such
as snow balls, dodge balls, plungers and even an odd weapon that
turns the enemies into dancing fiends. Anyway, its more of the
same annoying stuff that I’ve become accustomed to watching the
show.
Graphics:
The graphics engine is the same as used in Turok2 but
without all the special effects. The graphics in general have a
muddy feeling to them and I was very unimpressed. The two most
noticeable problems (besides the texture tearing, the random dots
and poor clipping) are the poor weapon models and the annoying
fog that covers everything. Every other texture in the game is well
smoothed and then you look at the weapons and realize how dirty
they look. The edges of them are not anti-aliased and the
textures appear to be in a lower resolution then the rest of the
game. The character models fit very well with the animation style
of the television show and I think that the developers did a good
job maintaining the feel of the show. Projectile graphics are very
poor and many of the special effects that are possible today are
not utilized. The most impressive effect is a green cloud that
appears when you set off a "fart" bomb. In total I believe this
game uses four textures for the levels and none of them are very
complex, however it must be taken into account that the show’s
animation style is very simple.
Sound:
The sound in South Park is the most annoying,
obnoxious, and repetitive sound I have ever heard in any game
since the advent of digital sound cards. The speech effects are
used over and over again until you take on a blank stare and start
to talk like Cartman. In the first and third chapters you have to
fight against turkeys and cows. The incessant mooing and
clucking led my roommate to unplug my speakers when I left the
room. Thankfully its all well recorded. You are able to put a
music CD in and have it play which is a nice feature. I would have
liked to be able to control which track I listened to but
unfortunately that option doesn’t exist.
Multiplay:
Multiplayer in South Park is the best feature of the game
by far. The multiplayer levels are well designed and make for
some pretty fast action. The weapons are fairly well balanced but
running out of ammo is a big problem. The dancing gizmo
weapon is slightly unfair as it makes you unable to move for about
ten seconds, which in multiplayer is a very long time. The game
plays pretty lag free but I have a fast connection. Setting up and
configuring a server is very easy but the options are limited. The
game is very fun and a good departure from the standard first
person multiplayer games that are on the market.
Gameplay:
Multiplayer gameplay is fun but single player is an
exercise in patience. The game plays very linearly and the level
design is very boring. In each level the game sends wave after
wave of enemies after you and supplies you with very little ammo.
The enemies are also very annoying in that they do little but
attempt to run into you. Bosses are very easy to defeat it just
takes a while because they can take so many hits. The most
annoying part of the entire game is the ability of certain enemies
to clone themselves and send more enemies after you. It gets very
old, very fast. The weapons are fun but don’t do enough damage.
The good weapons that are actually able to damage an opponent
are few and far between. Often I found myself reduced to
throwing snowballs, which are the default weapon. Each weapon
does have the ability to fire two different ways but still there is
enough variety or power behind the weapons. I would consider
this game annoying rather then challenging due to the poor level
design and the weapon/enemy ratio which makes it impossible to
have a good time.
Fun Factor & Overall Impression:
If you are a religious watcher of the show I can imagine
you would like this game. I however found it to be very boring
and tedious. I had fun playing multiplayer but I cannot give the
game high ratings based on that alone. This game is fun for five
minutes, after that deleting it is about the only fun I had. In
conclusion I would only pick this game up if you love South Park
or are a huge multiplayer fan.