14 DAY TRIAL // 
South Park is the most recent major entertainment property that the development team at Zen Studios has decided to transform into pinball material, and the two tables based on it are the at moment available on the various platforms on which the game is available.
Gamers will get access to a hilarious, sometimes frustrating and fun experience which manages to evoke nostalgia for real world arcades and the money lost playing them, while also introducing some cool ideas that would be probably hard to implement outside of the video game world.
Gamers will be able to experience one table called South Park’s Super-Sweet Pinball, which involves a wide range of characters, with some of the standouts including the four core characters Kyle, Stan, Kenny and Cartman, with regulars Wendy, Garrison, Chef, ManBearPig, Butters, Timmy and more added to the mix.
At the same time, a special second piece of content is included, called Butters’ Very Own Pinball Table, designed to showcase the alternate personalities that he can adopt, including Marjorine and Professor Chaos.
I honestly can’t decide which of the two I love most and I suspect fans will create more themselves into one camp or another.
The full South Park table asks the player to hit certain character areas in order to activate missions built either around the core cast or various major events.
I love the Cartman challenge the most, with its alien and paranoia-filled elements, but because of placement, the easiest to start is Stan’s, who relies on the player to get the help needed to kiss Wendy without throwing up as usual.
The table is well balanced, although the Kenny content is harder to access than I would like, and a lot of points can be scored when using multiballs, which are unlocked via a particularly humorous and thematic South Park moment.
There’s also an episode counter on the table, which apparently unlocks a bonus for those who hit it enough times.
The only problem is that the layout makes it a little hard to keep the ball in play when trying to hit the Cartman objective.
The Butters’ table is thematically cooler because it focuses on just one character and his top moments from the show.
Gamers can try to become a girl, will deal with AwesomeO and can try to get access to real ninja weapons, but the real highlight is the section which sees Butters become Captain Chaos.
The table is even more challenging because the extreme left and right lanes tend to catch a lot of balls that I had no way of rescuing and I struggled to replicate the high scores I reached in the core South Park experience.
These are just small issues and they are unable to detract gamers from the challenge of finding out exactly how to activate all the elements on the tables and then work hard to deliver high score after high score.
Zen Studios has been creating additions to the pinball video game genre for a long time, and the new tables it has created are examples of how good the experiences they make can be.
South Park Pinball looks good on the PlayStation 4 and moves with no framerate issues, which is important for the genre, and the development team has wisely chosen to use a paper and glue look for both tables, which evokes the feel of the show itself.
The characters are nicely rendered and the voice clips that accompany gameplay are taken from the episodes themselves, which is easy to observe when it comes to Chef, who has limited lines because the character is no longer on the show.
I love the little close-ups that show more details or the character expressions that happen when a particular mission is activated.
The music is equally original and engaging, but the Butters-themed table is a bit weird because it uses a yellow heavy color set which can be tiring after a while.
The Good
- South Park content integration
- Varied missions
- Butters-focused table
The Bad
- Some hungry lanes
- Kenny content is hard to activate
Conclusion
Zen Studios seems to have an almost uncanny ability to understand what makes big franchises tick and appeal to large numbers of gamers, and then take the concepts and create impressive tables based around them.
With South Park, they have managed to reconstitute the irreverent tone of the series, while also introducing solid table design, although there are moments when the tables can feel a little unfair.
The only big problem for me as a fan of the series is that there was no way for Zen Studios to have included all the glorious moments that I remember from episodes and I tend to constantly re-build the content in my mind to include new concepts and moments.
Regardless of the complexity of the connection gamers have with South Park, they will surely chuckle at least a few times as they play the two pinball tables and they will surely enjoy the core mechanics created by Zen Studios.
