I've never been all that interested in South Park, but my brother in law has been telling me to give it a try for the past couple years. Since I just got an HBO Max subscription, I finally watched a few episodes, and...yeah, it's okay.
But now that I have some context, I decided to give the video game a chance. Stick of Truth plays a lot like Paper Mario, with turn based battles where your attacks deal extra damage and your shields block more damage if you can time your button presses right...which I can never seem to get the hang of. You're supposed to hit X when your weapon flashes, and I am, so why am I still only doing 1 damage per hit? Blocking has a similar problem, especially with arrows. It tells you to press X when the little shield icon appears, but I swear it's just ignoring me.
South Park's trademark humor is on full display just about everywhere you look. The whole town is freely exportable, with side quests and easter eggs that I'm sure more avid fans than me will recognize. The subtitles are a little glitchy, though. I've had to reboot the game more than once when they suddenly stopped working. That normally wouldn't be that big of a deal, but given the silly voices everyone uses and how fast they talk, it became almost impossible to understand some of the characters without them.
South Park: The Stick of Truth (PS4)
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DaHeckIzDat
- Posts: 2343
- Joined: April 9th, 2015, 1:41 pm
Re: South Park: The Stick of Truth (PS4)
Played for a couple more hours today. Went everywhere in town and did a few sidequests, now I'm massively over leveled and have more money than I can possibly spend. And you know what? I'm okay with that.
One thing I didn't mention yesterday is the save system. You can pause the game and save whenever you want, but the game tells straight up tells you that it isn't actually saving your game. The game autosaves at seemingly random times. I would win a boss fight, and the game wouldn't save, but then it would save when I walked into a room I've been in a hundred times before. But that's not the end of it. Even if it autosaves, that only counts for if you die and have to restart. Once the autosave finishes, then you have to save the game again manually if you want to be able to turn off the console and pick up again where you left off. If you don't follow this very specific set of rules, you could end up having to replay entire sections of the game.
Why did they make it like this? Would it really have been that hard just to implement a normal save system?
One thing I didn't mention yesterday is the save system. You can pause the game and save whenever you want, but the game tells straight up tells you that it isn't actually saving your game. The game autosaves at seemingly random times. I would win a boss fight, and the game wouldn't save, but then it would save when I walked into a room I've been in a hundred times before. But that's not the end of it. Even if it autosaves, that only counts for if you die and have to restart. Once the autosave finishes, then you have to save the game again manually if you want to be able to turn off the console and pick up again where you left off. If you don't follow this very specific set of rules, you could end up having to replay entire sections of the game.
Why did they make it like this? Would it really have been that hard just to implement a normal save system?
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DaHeckIzDat
- Posts: 2343
- Joined: April 9th, 2015, 1:41 pm
Re: South Park: The Stick of Truth (PS4)
With a game like this, it can be hard to tell if a problem is genuine bad design, or the writers trolling you in classic South Park style. Like, one of Stick of Truth's sidequests ends with you fighting Al Gore as a boss fight. Al Gore is a really high level, so if you fight him early in the game (like I did) you'll get obliterated. You're free to leave him and come back later once you've leveled up, but he'll constantly spam your phine with annoying texts, which only stop when you beat him. So even though the side quest is available right from the start, the game actively punishes you for doing it before a certain point.
In any other game, I'd call that bad, annoying design. But seeing how Stick of Truth was made by the show's own creators, I have a feeling that was what they intended from the start. Still annoying, though.
In any other game, I'd call that bad, annoying design. But seeing how Stick of Truth was made by the show's own creators, I have a feeling that was what they intended from the start. Still annoying, though.