South Park Review

Single and Multiplayer

Thresh's comments in BLACK

CalBear's comments in BLUE

Plays like a side scroller?

CalBear:
The single player game from South Park is quite boring and repetitive. Players are goaded along through levels that so obviously linear that it's not even funny. The arrows along the paths that point you to the level goals exacerbate the linearity of the game. The sad part is that the arrows are necessary because it's hard to tell which parts you've already walked through and which you haven't. This is due partially to unimaginative level design and partly to the lack of distinguishing textures on any surfaces. Sometimes things just all look the same, and the arrows have to help you along. Did I mention the old school jump puzzles? There are a few of those here, and they're just as annoying as they ever have been.

Then there's the matter of the enemies and their AI. The turkeys in the first level are horribly dumb and easy to kill. The only challenge that's added is that they send more and more turkeys at you. If you turn them in the right direction, you'll get them all lined up and easy to mow down with snowballs or the sponge dart gun. As you progress through the levels, the enemies get harder. Cows run faster and can run over you. Clones will be harder to kill and throw snowballs. But there's no intelligence or spice to speak of. It's like playing single player Doom all over again with the dozens upon dozens of demons coming after you.

Notice the fences on the side reinforcing the linear level design?

Multiplayer

Thresh:
Multiplayer is a little bit more fun than the interminable single player game. At least you get smarter opponents who are harder to kill! The bad part about multiplayer is that there's no real "middle class" of weapons. Some will kill you quickly or in one shot, and others take forever to kill opponents. There were times where I'd be literally emptying my sponge dart gun or my warpo ray on someone and they wouldn't die. Then all of a sudden I get hit with one cow and I'm dead. Then other times it would take seemingly few hits from me to mow down people with ease.

Besides the strange weapon balance and unpredictable damage, there's the issue of characters. Each South Park character of course has a different size. Chef is probably the biggest one, and the kids are smaller, with Ike (Kyle's little brother) being the smallest. The problem is that it's obviously unfair for someone to be a smaller character because they present a much smaller target than say, Chef. In Quake 2, making the composite firing area of each model equal to every other model solved this problem. They didn't seem to do this with South Park. While the Ike character only starts with 25 health to balance this out, the other kids like Wendy (Stan's girlfriend) are still quite small and start with 100 health. There's no point in playing big characters like Mr. Garrison or Chef, which is pretty lame.