South Park: Let’s Go Tower Defence Play!
A Junkie Gamer Review by David Stiff
The latest South Park inspired game has made its way to the Xbox game marketplace, priced at 800 of your Microsoft points. South Park I hear you say. “Does it have snow?” Yes indeed it does.
Okay, you will have worked out from the title that this is a tower defence game, and may be thinking “oh yet another one for the genre”, however to think this would be a little foolhardy as this is a little beauty of a game.
Within this game you have two game types: the normal campaign mode and a challenge mode.
The campaign game opens with Cartman explaining that he is the only one that can see the troubles happening in South Park, and he is going to stop them from happening. But as you can expect he can not do this alone, cue the arrival of the rest of the South Park kids, but not until you have unlocked them.
Level one sees you start the game as Stan, wondering what is going on. The developers have been kind here and placed some towers as defence for you to learn the ropes, that begin throwing snowballs at the wave of attackers that increase in number and resistance as each wave passes. You can help out by throw snowballs too by pressing the A button. Also in the early levels there is a lot of snow and a path that has been cleared. The waves only will walk on the clear paths, so you can follow the path and place your towers where required. The towers are automatically firing which means that you can take control of your character, and move around the screen throwing snowballs. Your job on each level is to stop any member of the waves making their way along the path to the other side, and if their energy is depleted they randomly drop coins which you need to collect. Coins are needed in subsequent levels so that you can build your towers, and upgrade them later.
You meet up with the kids and other residents as you progress through the game, each having (not surprisingly) their own positive and negative abilities. Cartman is slow but his throws are harder resulting in more damage to the attacking forces, whereas Kyle is fast but weak. Obviously you can only control one player in the single game mode, so to transfer to another player you only need to press RB to cycle through those on screen, so you can move them around and put them in key positions. The characters you do not control act as towers themselves, throwing snowballs at the foes as they pass. If they die you simply need to walk over them and they regenerate.
As each level passes you move to a different area within South Park and the comic aspects seen in the television programme are not lost in the game, and you will laugh while you are playing this. The enemies for instance are cows, hippies, Jackovasaurus, the list goes on, but one thing to be sure about is if you have seen them on TV then you will see them in the game.
The challenge mode is more of the same, however you need to complete levels that are now more challenging due to less snow to place towers and the waves can take multiple paths, something that is annoying to begin with when all the kids are trampled over and you lose the level. (OMG they killed me, you #*^%+%^). You can only play the levels and characters that you have unlocked through the campaign mode, so it does add replay value to the game.
Comically this is very strong, some parts more than others, however like most tower defence style games the fun is better when you are playing with others. Thankfully the developers have not missed this trick and have online and offline multiplayer modes.
Both the campaign and challenge modes are available to play online but like the offline challenge mode you can only play in the areas and with characters you have unlocked from the single player game.
The Xbox Live games are how to play the challenge mode though (unless you have 4 people at home when you want to play) as they are very tricky and you need all available hands on snowballs to pass some of the levels.
This game is rewarding and frustrating in equal measures, but you will want to play the levels over again until you complete them and unlock more of the game.
So you are probably wondering, is this worth a purchase? If you are into tower defence games then you will love this game, especially with the well thought out twist to the genre. Likewise if you want a game that will help past a few hours you will also have a blast with this game.
The developers have done extremely well to create a game that will appeal to the masses without alienating the fans of tower defence games, and for that reason, and given that the cut scenes are genuinely funny, I would say this is a worthwhile purchase.
