South Park: Phone Destroyer (iOS) Review

After the episode about freemium gaming on the show, it feels kind of hilarious to see South Park getting its own freemium game on iOS formats. It gives South Park: Phone Destroyer a meta-feeling of self-awareness, and this self-awareness flows through the entire game in true South Park fashion.

The plot is just as stupid and out of leftfield as would be expected from Parker and Stone. The people of South Park have all started to play the latest Smartphone title, and it is up to the legendary Phone Destroyer – a kid known for never leaving their phone – to tip the scales of balance by fighting off the citizens of South Park in epic strategic games. This all sounds like an amazing idea… and it could have been.

The premise, humour, and gameplay is spot on for a fun freemium iOS experience, and just about balances on meta jokes well enough for them to be funny without ruining immersion or getting old or the feel of dad jokes – in other words, just like other South Park games. This self-awareness radiated does, however, just make the flaws of it all the more upsetting. The problems of South Park: Phone Destroyer are many in number, and mostly tied to how P2W (Play-to-Win) the progression system is.

While there is a single-player mode, it does not take long until being faced by the great (pay)wall of China and forced to enter the PvP section. Fair enough, the naïve might think, at first, how bad can it be? Unless willing to spend money, “very bad” is the response. While the great wall only requires a couple of wins to proceed, larger problems eventually approach as it is very obvious that the power of the enemies in the campaign increases far quicker than a f2p player’s collection does. This means people are stuck farming, but the diabolical side of this makes it so that each time an encounter is won, the difficulty of said encounter skyrockets, as well.

The only choice left is to play PvP, and that can be a nightmare unless knowing how to do it. The trick to the PvP is to never proceed past a checkpoint on the ladder and stay low, since if one proceeds, they will get annihilated by veteran players and whales, which creates an un-fun experience. While there are cards locked behind said checkpoints, it is often worth it to just farm up the cards from the first couple of tiers to max level. This is not really explained, though, and if past the checkpoints and out of your league, it is beack to being stuck farming for things to empower the decks against opponents vastly better equipped, thus creating a very unpleasant experience that will eventually drive most to buy packs from the shop.

It is a system without nuance, there is no real route of progression for a PvE player, but everyone is forced to eventually start going into the PvP, either to get loot, or by getting past that pay-wall. The fact that South Park made an entire episode about freemium games mocking them and calling them the work of the Canadian Satan would leave most to believe that the team would care to do a South Park phone game as a stellar example of how a good freemium title could look like. Instead, it took the most terrible approach imaginable by not only making it built on a loot box system, but one that requires several copies of each legendary to get the high levelled one, which is of course strictly better than most cards in the game, and tonnes of crafting material to even make the cards playable. This, mixed with forced PvP, makes the player either exploit the system or end up getting exploited by it.

Do not get anything wrong. From a mechanical standpoint the game is stellar; the humour is most of the time spot on. The Canadian Satan has a hard grip on the soul of the game, and the freemium mechanics are stacked upon one another like a gigantic house of cards, in a way, which makes what would normally be a very pleasant and wonderful game into a horrible experience, unless willing to spread that wallet far and wide for the Canadian Satan.