South Park Review

6.5

Format PC

Developer Iguana

Publisher Acclaim

Genre Unknown

Paul Mallinson

This is one crazy game. Those familiar with Comedy Central's hit show South Park will no doubt have expected nothing less, it being one of the sickest/funniest cartoons ever made for TV.

Mutant turkeys, drooling morons, piss-soaked snowballs, farting dolls and profane language all feature heavily in this relentless 3D shoot 'em up of ill repute, and, rather sadly, the end result is somewhat hard to like and difficult to recommend.

The main problem is that although South Park is faithful to the TV series in almost every respect, the game is highly repetitive. South Park is essentially a first person shoot 'em up with a fairly slick 3D engine and Quake-like controls. The graphics are extremely colourful, the music well-produced and the voices apt. The gameplay, on the other hand, consists of little more than fending off wave after wave of marauding monsters by using outlandish weaponry dished out during the course of the game. For the first half an hour you love it - the screeching turkeys; the swearing; the music - but after that it all seems to get a bit too much. The relentless 'gobbling' of the mutant turkeys rapidly becomes extremely unnerving, and the infrequent end-of-level guardians do little to lift the proceedings. Dispatch the turkeys and they're replaced by mutant Big Gay Als...

The cause of all this lunacy is a comet on a collision course with Earth, which is explained by Chef (by far the best character in the series, and wonderfully played by Isaac 'Shaft' Hayes) in a series of excellent 3D cartoons.

Virtually every character from the series eventually makes an appearance at some point in the game, but unfortunately these cameos add little to the overall gameplay experience and seem little more than window dressing. The multiplayer game makes up for a proportion of this, but not enough to make anyone other than the most die-hard South Park fans to part with their money.