The Good and Bad of South Park’s Combat

Kotaku’s Jason Schreier has penned an editorial on what he considers to be the pros and cons of South Park: The Stick of Truth’s combat system. Here’s a snip:

CON: You can use items and attack in the same turn.

In any given round you can both heal yourself and damage your opponent, which is sort of like playing the whole game on god mode. The core of combat in most turn-based RPGs is that tension between offensive and defense. Deciding at any given moment whether to stay conservative and heal or go aggressive and attack is one of those minute-to-minute empowering choices that makes RPGs work. (Exacerbating this problem is the fact that Stick of Truth lets you stack up tons and tons of different types of healing items, to the point where it’s impossible to run out.)

So even on the hardest difficulty mode, Stick of Truth’s combat is a little too easy toward the end of the game, thanks to attack-all abilities like the Jew class’s plague spell and Cartman’s fire… uh… magic, it’s simple to blow through even the most difficult battles in one or two rounds. If items cost a turn, the game would be significantly more challenging.

…

PRO: Almost every battle feels meaningful.

My biggest concern going into Stick of Truth was that the combat, as energy-consuming as it is, would be way too draining if there were too many battles. Wisely, the folks behind the South Park RPG chose not only to limit the number of encounters in every stage but to give you ways to interact with the environment in order to take down baddies outside of battle. You can set traps for mice, send aliens down garbage disposals, and electrocute your fellow fourth-graders while exploring the ridiculous world of South Park and its surrounding areas.

This is a rather simple system there are only so many objects you can touch, and only so many things you can do but it makes you feel smart when you manage to take out an entire gang of elf kids without even entering combat. Other than a few sections like, say, Canada’s annoying dire wolves (like wolves, but dire) there are no battles that feel unnecessary or wasted.