South Park: Tenorman’s Revenge Review

South Park games have a reputation of being very mediocre. This trend dates back to even the Nintendo 64 era. Thankfully, a lot of the South Park games at least capture the humor of the show. South Park came to XBLA before as a Tower Defense title a while back and has now returned with a brand new game, South Park: Tenorman’s Revenge from Other Ocean.

The entire basis of the platformer is that Scott Tenorman has returned to take revenge upon Cartman. To do this, he breaks into Cartman’s house and steals his Xbox 360 Harddrive from an older model. The Xbox 360 Cartman owns is actually a slim. So he won’t have to play through all of his games all over again, the guys travel across time and space (because plot) to stop Tenorman and retrieve the Harddrive.

The game features 22 levels across 9 “worlds” for your to explore and conquer. You venture to the future, the sewers, heaven and everywhere in between. While you traverse the levels, you have to collect Time Cores to unlock the next world. Along with Time Cores, there are also Mega Men to collect. You gain Time Cores by finding them in the level, collecting all the Mega Men, and getting a Gold Medal on the level.

As far as level design goes, early on it really isn’t that great but towards the second half of the game the designs start to get really good. My least favorite levels are the ones that take place in the sewer. But once I got out of them, everything slowly started getting better.

I really enjoyed the levels that took place in Heaven and Hell just because of how different from each other they were. Heaven had you focusing on trying to watch out for invincible Angels that it seemed were to trying to knock you off of your cloud while also trying to scale up and across the clouds. Another hazard was the fact that, since you were in Heaven, you didn’t always have a cloud to land on if you fell from where you were which would cause instant death.

Hell, was similar in how many hazards there were but went about traversing the level differently. Instead of just regular jumping from here to there it sort of reminded me of Pitfall in the way that there some sections required you to swing from vines/ropes to get to other platforms. Also, instead of just left to right (or vice versa) many sections of the levels have you going downward, deeper into the depths of hell while having to watch out for pits of lava. The level also included some annoying little creatures that would multiply whenever you kill them.

In most levels, there are Time Particles that increase your score when collected and also reduce your time for the level. Your aim is to get as little time possible to have “passed” by the time you get to the end of the level. To get a Gold Medal you generally have to get a couples minutes negative on the level. While this may sound difficult, if you have at least 1 co-op partner, you should be able to Gold Medal most, if not all, levels fairly easily.

As far as the combat in the game goes, it works fine most of the time. However, sometimes you will run into instances where the game doesn’t count a hit, though the instances are not super often. Most of the time that the hits not registering happen when you are trying to jump on a ginger’s head. There are six different weapons in the game that can ease your destruction of the Ginger-Bots. There is a crowbar, a baseball bat, a portal gun (not from the game Portal), a football (which only Stan uses), a Bubble gun, and water balloons.

Each character has their own special abilities. Cartman can bust through walls with his belly, Stan throws a football to hit switches, Kenny can high jump, and Kyle removes his hat to reveal he is a ginger which lets him through barriers and stun gingers. Each of them can also become their alter ego from the series. When they become their alter ego they can then access super hero powers. The powers are Flight (Kyle), Drilling (Stan), Wall Climbing (Cartman) and Invincibility (Kenny).

The part where this game shines brightest is the humor. It uses the same style of humor as in the show and hits it perfectly. I found myself laughing my ass off more times than I can count. The characters’ comments at the beginning of the levels are normally pretty funny, even when its just them getting pissed and cursing about where the Time Portal sent them. The storytelling of the narrator as he reads about “Eric the Awesome and Cool” is also enough to make you chuckle. This game is definitely one of the more humorous titles this year.

South Park: Tenorman’s Revenge is no where near a great game. The fact that the hit detection doesn’t always want to register can really be frustrating and the overall blandness of the title is very apparent as you play. Honestly, the game is truly only for the South Park faithful. If you are a fan of the show, the humor alone can keep you going but seeing the Easter eggs and nods at other parts of the show are really cool.