Welcome to our review of South Park – The Fractured But Whole for Nintendo Switch. A highly anticipated game finally arriving on Nintendo Switch!

South Park – The Fractured But Whole originally released in 2017 as a game for PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox 1, developed by Ubisoft. The game is the second in the franchise as Stick of Truth released back in 2014. South Park – The Fractured But Whole is the first South Park game of the series on a modern Nintendo console. I personally hope we will eventually see Stick of Truth ported as well; as both games are amazing.

Lander reviewed the original release of this game and rated it at 8.5, his review can be found here.

As this game is a port, basically nothing really changed. So I will just give a basic review of the actual game followed by my experience playing it in handheld mode.

As you start playing this tactical RPG, it becomes clear that aside from the expected profanity, everything comes down to Cartman bossing you around. As he is the Coon in this game, he is the mastermind of your band of superheroes or at least he thinks he is. Something seems amiss and you start your first quest. Like any RPG, you go from one quest to the other, fixing some side quests along the way, … But in true South Park fashion, you can fart on people, take selfies for Coonstagram and become popular. They diss on the social media obsession quite heavily. I loved it.

As you progress, you level up, learn to craft, … all flavored in true South Park style. One of your attacks comes down to farting, another one is shooting a laser beam, the other is setting your enemies on fire, … Nothing is normal yet everything is totally South Park.

Now, as Lander already reviewed the game itself, it is time to address the elephant in the room. This game is now out on Nintendo Switch. Being able to play a game of this caliber on a portable device, it sure is cool, but how does it really perform?

I have some remarks to make, is the best way to describe how it performs.

Keeping in mind that most games nowadays do have day 1 updates, I assume that most of my remarks will be fixed. But here goes, I had 3 times now in my 8 hours of playing the game that the game borked on me.

First time, I was visiting Wendy Testaburger and after befriending her on Coonstagram, I became unable to leave the room. The sole thing it did, was allowing me to open the map, but nothing more, I had to quit the game and restart, but I must also give praise here, it autosaved me right at the part where I entered the room. My second time, no issues at all, I was able to talk to Wendy, grab the yaoi painting on the wall and just leave. Despite being a remark, it must be said that it did not set me back or really annoy me.

Second and third time, it kept loading before starting a fight with some sixth graders (both times), I did have the ability to go into the menus though and after I switched out SuperCraig for Jimmy, in both cases it appeared to unblock the game again. It did annoy me a little the first time, but as I remembered what to do, it unblocked things real quickly the second time. Again praise needs to be given that I did not end up having to replay parts of the game. It did even out.

Obviously, remarks like this come down to coincidence, if I switched out a member of my team for a fight, it would never have happened, if I grabbed the yaoi picture first, would it still have crashed? All speculation and I do assume a day 1 patch will fix issues like these.

Another small note though, I think the audio volume might be a little higher when playing handheld mode. I often tend to multitask while playing, but this was not possible as I needed my full attention to listen to the game. On TV, I could just increase the volume, but in handheld, I had to pinch my ears to be sure not to miss out on any details. Might be just me, but I felt it was worth mentioning.

I can easily ignore the previous remarks when it comes down to rating this game, South Park – The Fractured But Whole is an amazing game, I can’t put it away and I even found myself playing it on the toilet much like our hero is often on the toilet. It really is that cool. I am following Lander completely in his 85% rating as this would be mine as well.

8.5/10

Now let us address the other elephant in the room, Stick of truth! I hope Ubisoft announces this game for Nintendo Switch as well. It would just belong on a Nintendo console and I hope Ubisoft can be convinced to port this one as well.

Please Ubisoft, let us enjoy the other South Park game too!

Tested on Nintendo Switch