Littlebitsofgaming

South Park games in general have been pretty awful over the years.

From the terrible FPS South Park on the N64 to horrendous Chef's Luv Shack and South Park Rally. Even the newer games like South Park Let's Go Tower Defense Play! and Tenorman's Revenge with there mediocrity game-play hardly stood out.

Then onto The Stick Of Truth.

The good...

This really, really, really looks and feels like South Park. The animation is there, the tone is there the original voices are there. This is the most accurate South Park game made to date. The presentation is spot on and you do feel like you are interacting with the TV show.

You can tell time and effort has been put into this to make it look and feel like the TV show.

The Bad...

They seem to have forgotten this is a game as the game-play is so trite and stale this plays like a game from the early late 90's. Many of the game-play mechanics are so archaic they would have been outdated 15+ years ago. From not being able to sell stacked items as a stack and having to go though each individual item separately....tiresome. To tired old fighting mechanics that RPGs from the late 90's learned just do not work.

This is an RPG first and foremost...and RPG with only about 8 hours of game-play as the story is so short and the side quests even shorter. Plus it only has a level 15 cap, which you will hit WAY before you even get close to finishing the game, leaving you with very little to do in terms of ROLE PLAYING in this ROLE PLAYING GAME. This is an insult to RPG gamers. This game did not "need" to be an RPG and would have suited a simple button mashing beat em' up...which it essentially is as most of the battles you have do resort to simple button mashing. There really are little to no RPG elements in this supposed RPG game.

The map you can explore is only done so on a faux 3D plane, meaning you are really playing within a 2D environment...which does make sense given the show it is based on. But this also means the map itself is not very explorable with very few places to access. It's just not a big enough map for an RPG to be set in and does become very tiresome when you are back tracking over the same locales over and over and over with nothing to do to keep the exploring fresh.

The difficulty setting in this game is unbelievably easy, even on the hardest setting. There is no challenge to this game at all, so much so it may as well have just been an episode of the show you could just sit and watch.

Overall, it's a very dull and uninspired game...South Park or not. This should have been an arcade style game downloadable from XBLA or PSN, etc as that is what it feels like. It's most definitely not worth the full retail price being asked.

For a South Park game, it's full of references and jokes you can relive if you are a fan of the show...or you could just watch the show. For an RPG game, it's just so flat it's not really worth looking into as there are FAR better RPGs out there and cheaper.

Peter Molyneux can pretty much be credited with creating a whole new genre in games. When he made and released "Populous" in 1989, he changed the way games were made forever.

Shame he has not made any truly great games for a while though. All Mr. Molyneux is famous for now is hyping up games so far that when you do get to play them, you feel "robbed". "Fable" is no exception. I'll go back to when this game was called "Project Ego". We were promised an open world that would be fully explorable. Branching missions that changed the story. An exact quote from then was "If there is a fence in your way, just simply jump over it and keep exploring. We won't restrict the gamer's options."

When the game became "Fable"...it lost around 90% of what was said to make the game unique. There is no open fully explorable world, there are no branching missions that change the story, etc.

Fable is a VERY linear RPG. You walk around confined areas with little to see and do. The towns are small and almost unpopulated with very few buildings to use. The only thing kept from "Project Ego" to "Fable" was the fact you could be good or bad, and that is hardly all that interesting either. Other than having NPCs react to you differently, there is no point in being good or bad at all. Still the same story...just the last seconds at the end of the game will be different.

Now don't get me wrong, "Fable" is not a bad game. It's just not the game we were promised. There is still fun to be had, but it's restrictive fun. Being good or bad is pointless and gets tiresome FAST. The story is cliché ridden with no surprises. The side quests and mini games are tedium defined.

From the dictionary...Fable: an untruth; falsehood. Yup, that pretty much sums up the game perfectly.

Fable 2 is being worked on and looks "good". It seems to have more in common with what "Project Ego" was said to be than what "Fable" became. But knowing Peter Molyneux, don't hold your breath.