South Park: The Fractured But Whole (2017)

Took me about 20 hours to finish it. Not as great as The Stick of Truth but still an enjoyable experience if you're a fan of South Park.

What I Liked:

• The turn-based Combat system has been improved greatly. There is more depth and strategy to the fights. Makes it more fun.
• Character customization is deeper as well. And there are more ways to interact with the environment.
• The map is larger, so more places to explore in South Park.
• Graphically, it looks great. Even more refined that The Stick of Truth and again makes you feel like you're playing a season of South Park.
• The superhero parody story fits nicely with the current superhero dominated cinema. And I always enjoyed The Coon and Friends stuff, so it was great having to control all of that like it was great having to control the medieval fantasy stuff in Stick of Truth.
• Some nice difficulty bumps here and there that give more of a challenge, especially with some boss fights.

What I didn't like:

• I wish there was more of a challenge as aside from a few bumps in difficulty, it was easy on Normal/Heroic difficulty.
• The story as a whole was underwhelming. Stick of Truth was better easily. The writing wasn't as good, the jokes, the climax, the ridiculousness, all of it just seemed toned down. Not horrible and definitely enjoyable, but still underwhelming.
• The ending was anti-climatic. Game sorta ends quickly instead of giving you a proper climax.
• Since this covers more content from the last several seasons, the PC culture and SJW stuff, while fun at first, got old soon. I wish more stuff from past seasons was incorporated too.
• Nothing like the "Canada" portion of the first game here along with other raunchy stuff that makes Fractured Butt Whole feel tamed and less in content.
• Additions like having buddy powers to solve puzzles were fun at first but the game never explores that properly and pretty much every puzzle is easy and it gets repetitive later on because of that.

Overall, I enjoyed it. I love South Park, and The Stick of Truth is one of the best cases of using a license properly. So it was gonna be hard to top it. But I'm glad Fractured But Whole still gives the fans enough to have an enjoyable time for about 15-25 hours, depending on your playstyle.

The novelty of having to play a game like this for the first time cannot be replicated so that obviously had an effect on my enjoyment too.

If I were to rate it, I'd probably give it 7.5 - 8/10.

P.S Like the previous game, no point in playing it if you haven't seen South Park. You might still enjoy it but you'll miss more than half of the fun.

Overall a fantastic game. If you love South Park you'll easily love this game. All I would say is that, being someone who played the game just after it came out (It is possible these problems will be fixed later), there were a lot of glitches in the game that causes the screen to freeze in combat. I had to do one of the boss fights without Tweek on my team as the game froze every time the battle started up. One of the boss fights also had to be restarted several times as the game either froze or characters became stuck.

I hope these problems will be fixed though as other than the frustrations during these situations I absolutely loved the game. It's possible these problems are limited to the PS4 release as well.