South Park: The Fractured But Whole – Bring the Crunch DLC Review – A Bowl of Soggy Cereal

When Ubisoft stepped into the small mountain town of South Park with The Stick of Truth, gamers were floored by what an authentic South Park game could be. A few years later we were treated to the follow-up sequel capitalizing on the superhero craze with the fantastically titled Fractured But Whole. The game featured wonderful strategic combat, character customization, insane and dark humor; basically everything you would expect from Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The narrative was wonderful, the game was lengthy and never dull, it really was like playing through an interactive South Park movie. That brings us to the latest DLC for Fractured But Whole titled Bring the Crunch. While it brings some new content and a new adventure for the kids to go on, this DLC felt a little too tacked on in more ways than one.

In Bring the Crunch the kids are all going away to summer camp only to discover that all of the camp counselors have been brutally and horrifically murdered – and this is South Park we are talking about so it really is cringe-inducing. Timmy pipes up that if they want to have summer camp they need to save at least one camp counselor and so the kids set out to find and protect any surviving counselors from the horrible monsters who plague the woods.

You’ll be locked to a team of Timmy, Butters, and Bradley as Fastpass, Professor Chaos, and Mintberry Crunch respectively. Crunch is a new addition to the game, offering up some much needed new tactics in the way of defensive and offensive buffs that work together. You’ll also unlock a new archetype of combat: The Last Girl. This plays off of the idea of how horror movies always have one survivor – the last girl who manages to rig together traps and weapons to come out on top. With a new outfit and set of new moves, the abilities are unique but can be swapped with any moves you prefer at any time.

Clearly, this DLC would have to be limited to the campgrounds, but as additional content it just felt small. There were few puzzles and they weren’t challenging, a handful of battles, and really no stand-out content to speak of. That’s not to say it was bad, but Fractured But Whole set a precedent of quality content and what we got instead was – at most – two hours of rinse and repeat, and that’s me rounding up. There is space for a great story here, it just never comes.

The difficulty in Bring the Crunch is amped up at least, making you be much more selective with your attacks and forces you to think with a more tactical mind than the base game. This makes combat more intense, however, as the story starts to wrap up we are met with a string of boss battles that kill whatever momentum the narrative had going. After the first boss battle – which makes sense to the story – we are given not one but two more tacked on because… reasons? These additional battles are tied into the backstory of Mintberry Crunch but it’s the only aspect of Bring the Crunch where he feels necessary or significant. In fact they could have ditched the character altogether, added in anyone else from Coon and Friends and changed the name and had a more cohesive and interesting story. Considering South Park has always been a tongue-in-cheek and edgy comedy, I was expecting something a little more solid than the ending I got.

South Park: The Fractured But Whole’s DLC Bring the Crunch had the potential to be a great story and truly fun addition to an already exemplary game. It’s short length, lack of content, and unnecessary boss battles to pad the run time of an already short experience feel weak compared to the insane and wild content of the base game itself. Bring the Crunch feels like it should be a free update to the game and not a stand-alone DLC. This is a misstep for Ubisoft and despite the new abilities and additional characters, it doesn’t add anything meaningful to make it worthwhile.