South Park™: The Fractured But Whole™

The combat system is much more advanced than the Stick of Truth, with more classes, the ability to multi-class, a movement system allowing you to go horizontal or vertical on a grid, higher enemy counts and the ability to be joined by 3 allies at once instead of just 1 buddy, but it also comes with major downgrades. Player attacks have much more basic QTEs and getting their timing right is much less impactful, enemy attacks can't be blocked (only lightly recovered from with a QTE), item use takes up a turn and many attacks can be tedious to pull off since you have to get in range and your buddies can block your path (the game is very inconsistent about when allies get on the way with different ranged abilities), leading to lots of potential wasted or devalued turns. The balancing is generally better, since you’re switching between 4 characters you can’t just spam your most powerful attacks to curbstomp most battles, fights generally stay a decent challenge throughout the game (I was playing on the second hardest difficulty, Mastermind), but the game sometimes goes too far in the other direction by making enemies way too tanky. Being able to craft an endless supply of health items and revives meant I rarely died, so it wasn’t very tough, but it did lead to many fights being dragged out and becoming really boring, when the system works well it’s really fun, but it often doesn’t. Pacing is also a lot worse, the game is much longer than Stick of Truth which is a good thing, but progression is very uneven. Level progression and ability unlocking is much slower than in Stick of Truth, which isn’t cruel because you can usually take on encounters while underlevelled without it being too punishing but leads to the gameplay being stale, and half of your allies [spoiler](Call Girl, Professor Chaos and the Freedom Pals)[/spoiler] are unavailable until around ¾ of the way through the game, when it rapidly drops them all on you, making it feel like the game is coming to a close just as it gets a lot more interesting. Your allies have most of the abilities you use to unlock new areas instead of them all belonging to the New Kid, meaning you can only solve some of the puzzles and access certain paths very late. I did partly like the buddies having their abilities since it makes them feel much more involved and useful outside of combat, but it does make things more time consuming as well since you have to pick the right buddy for the puzzle, wait to summon them, then perform a QTE every time, rather than just cycling through a menu and pressing one button. The finale is genuinely terrible, relying on spamming several incredibly long boss fights at you with only short walking segments in between, creating artificial difficulty not through tough encounters but basically relying on wearing you down with attrition, after making me wish it wouldn't be over with the new character intros the shoddy execution of the last act made me very glad it was. The story is generally strong with different characters from the series being introduced and becoming prominent, taking different sides in factions and of course totally changing the theme compared to Stick of Truth, making it feel genuinely new, they do a good job referencing hero franchises like the Avengers, X-Men and Batman characters without it just being a lazy knockoff, but the story fumbles when it forgets a bunch of its plot threads or quickly tosses them away and has a lot less variety in its humour, constantly relying on fart jokes. It's not a bad game by any means, the much longer run time means it actually probably has better value for money than Stick of Truth, and I appreciate that they tried to make a more unique sequel with extensive mechanics and theme changes rather than just a copypaste of the original game, but design wise it drops the ball much more often than it improves things, making for way more clunky, boring and annoying moments. It's not enough to ruin the experience though and overall I'd recommend it, though the price might still be a bit high for a game that's almost 10 years old, so like with the first game I'd say buy on sale.