First Person Saturday - South Park

Licensed titles and FPS games seem to go hand in hand. From Robocop to James Bond to Alien, nearly every blockbuster franchise has a First Person Shooter to its name. However, the oddest licensed FPS has to be the N64 and PS1 title South Park, a game where the four boys set off to save the titular town from turkeys, aliens, and clones. Is it any good? Well, just ask almost anyone, and you'll get a resounding no. For a very, very good reason.

Being a N64 FPS, it's almost guaranteed that this game is a poor man's Turok. You basically just walk around fairly large levels infested with simplistic enemies, who you can take out with a variety of creative weapons. As you are playing as the South Park boys, you don't get your hands on any heavy weapons. However, you do get snowballs, farting Terrance and Phillip dolls, Nerf-esque miniguns, and more.

Heading back to the level design, it's one of the biggest gripes I have with the game. Like nearly every N64 game, it has terrible draw distance. This would be fine if you didn't often find yourself in large, open areas where you are surrounded by nothing but snowy fields that all look alike, with only one exit. Not only is everything hard to see, you won't really want to see any of the models. They're ugly, but not in the same way the original show is. The character models look nothing like the source material, and more half-melted snowmen adorned with solid colors. Most enemies also look all the same, which of course doesn't help in the slightest.

As expected for a South Park game, the game relies a lot on crude humor. You can use piss snowballs as weapons, cows can be launched at other players so you can stick anuses on their head, and turkeys literally poop out eggs left and right. Honestly, nothing in the game even got a chuckle out of me, despite loving the source material. When one of the worst parts of a South Park game is the humor, then there is something very, very wrong with the title.

The most baffling part of the game is the sound design, which is some of the absolute worst I've ever heard in the game. The music is the very definition of uninspired, with the entire soundtrack being filled with boring 'happy' tracks. Matt Stone and Trey Parker reprise their roles as Kenny, Stan, Kyle, and Cartman... Or at least I think they do, because voices are nearly incomprehensible. Whenever you do get to hear them clearly, they will repeat their lines long enough until you want to pierce your eardrums with toothpicks

During a mission, if you miss a powerful 'tank' enemy, you will have to take on these powerful foes while they invade the titular town itself. There are a lot of them, they hit the town hard. It's often difficult to complete these at times, as you often don't have enough time to track them all down before the town is blown up. It's an unnecessary mechanic sure, but it's fun to fight giant enemies in a recreation of the town's iconic main street.

Even as a South Park fan, I find it hard to recommend this game to anyone. South Park fans will be annoyed that it only feels like a normal sub par first person shooter with a South Park skin, FPS fans will find a bland shooter that's way too easy unless you miss a tank, and people who like good games would have dropped the game after the first level.

Did you ever play the South Park FPS? If so, what did you think?