The South Park series is one of the landmark series that has somehow stood the test of time for much longer than your normal affair. There are very few TV shows that can boast such a long runtime while also holding onto some level of standards in its content. The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad, and many other adult animated series have run for almost as long, if not longer, and have fallen off the rails of comedy with different writing teams and people who have just stopped paying attention to their jokes as a whole. South Park has remained relevant through satirical mayhem, basically taking whatever is happening in the world, making it ten times worse and putting it through their filters of humor. This series has been going for a long time by parodying the world as we know it.
This game is their take on the superhero genre, using their own superhero personas that they created for the TV show and creating new ones so that they can be put on this game to fight against one another. Using the basic premise of Captain America: Civil War, the MCU, the DCEU and many other facets of comedy, putting them all in a blender and trying to get the kids into making their own superhero franchises. Cartman, also known as The Coon, is going at this wholeheartedly while trying to hold everyone down to his standards and playing underhanded tricks to get you to do all of the work.
You play the same character you did in the Stick of Truth, only now you can choose your own gender in the center of the game and the game slaps post-modernism in the face with this little gem of an in-joke. You're able to choose from different types of heroes, later being able to choose from any and all of the powers that is teased in the beginning once you reach far enough into the story mode. Cartman has had a terrible falling out with several of the other kids, Kenny and Stan included, and now they're fighting against one another in a hero vs hero story.
The joke of the entire game is that it starts off with you trying to find a missing cat in what Cartman conceives as a way to get a hundred bucks to go toward their own superhero movie franchise. It starts off that way, but then goes down into a rabbithole of conspiracy that goes ridiculously deep to the point of absurdity, which is par for the course for this series. I won't spoil the ending, but what comes are a good bunch of twists and turns that fade off into a very stale joke at the very end.
Not every joke is very well crafted and there are some very repugnant jokes that go a little too far involving children and the main protagonist's parents. It all ends terribly but it at least makes up for it with some of the time traveling elements that they thankfully don't take too far. It's an interesting story while also being hilarious with how grown people just play along with some of the super hero elements that are make-believe while also having real world consequences. So long as you don't think too far into it, it works really well for some tongue-in-cheek gags that get a good bunch of laughs. I am told that some of these jokes were rehashed from later in the series, but my knowledge of the show in its later seasons is patchy and I didn't really catch any of that, so it was all essentially new to me.
This was made for the fans of the show, plain and simple. If you don't like the show, you are probably not going to like the story elements of this game. It still tells a good story and has some good gameplay, but the story does drag on, and as I said before, ends on a very sour note. It's worth a look if you're curious and are a diligent fan, though and I highly recommend it, even if you haven't watched it for a while. There are plenty of great callbacks and it's more or less just a really long episode of the show, almost a South Park Superhero movie of sorts. Take that for what you will. Virtua Ass Fire!
