South Park Let’s Go Tower Defense Play!: Meh
I’m not a South Park fan. Outside of the odd Halloween episode, I generally avoid the show. Not because I dislike the artwork, or the voices, or even the humor – I hate the politics.
The idea that instead of having a correct or incorrect way of viewing things, one must assume that ‘the answer might lie … somewhere in the middle!‘ is intellectually dishonest and offensive to anyone who has even the most meager grasp of world events.
But who cares, right? I should totally shut up and talk about the game, right?
South Park Tower Defense puts you in the shoes of the boys we’ve watched vomit and curse and engage in alarming activities on TV: Stan, Cartman, Kyle, Kenny, Butters, etc.
Where this game differs from classical Tower Defense games is that we’re given direct control of the little snowball-throwing dudes instead of relying solely on placed towers.
You can switch characters, build up their special ability (each has his own, Cartman, for example, rains fire down on all the enemies at once) and charge up your snowball attacks as needed to stop the influx of enemies: hippies, red-headed “Ginger Kids’, cows … basically anything that has threatened the boys on the show.
Your goal is simply to ensure that no enemies make it to town. You hinder their way by attacking them with snowballs and towers as they snake a path through each level.
And that’s about it.
As a Tower Defense game, it’s not that great. The controls are sluggish. The enemies are nothing we haven’t seen before ad nauseum on the show. The towers themselves are neither terribly interesting or effective. And you’re always forced to use the boys’ super powers because the game will just decide to be difficult for diffidulty’s sake.
And since the aforementioned towers kind of suck, you will quite literally find yourself mashing the ‘attack’ button as either Cartman (who seems to have a stronger throw) or Kyle (because he seems to move faster).
All the time that you’re playing, of course, you’re also assaulted with looped clips from the show. It gets really boring, really fast. How many times can I listen to Cartman or Stan repeat the same damn line? Not many. And I don’t enjoy the clips themselves nearly enough to distract me from the less-than-stellar gameplay.
The extras in SPTD amount to video clips from the show, story boards, artwork and the like. To be fair, there’s something like 80 video clips. And they are funny, but none of the extras are really worth the price of the game.
This game is for hardcore South Park fans.
But not anybody else at the current cost of 800 points.
Final Grade: C-
800 Points on Xbox Live Arcade