South Park is under attack, and it depends on your ability to defend it! Cartman, Stan, Kyle and Kenny task themselves with saving the town from rampaging ginger kids, old people, Satan worshipping forest animals, Mongolians, sixth graders and more. You will build fastball machines, lasers and more hysterical inventions to stop waves of advancing enemies over eleven stages.

As one would expect the levels take places on a variety of South Park landmarks such as Stan’s house, stark’s pond, hells pass hospital etc being just a handful of the locations at your disposal. Each new level increases both the difficulty and the towers you are able to use. As you progress snow which is required to build towers upon becomes scarcer, forcing you to adapt and be on your toes. Where some of the final levels include traps to lure enemies into and vast open plains which you will need to build paths to stop enemies easily reaching the other side of the screen.

South Park does have its share of issues but in terms of playability, for harder difficulties you will have limited funds in which to build towers, and extreme amounts of enemies to face with barely a second to breath between waves to the point you will be so busy you won’t even notice the break at times. This only becomes easier if you invite round friends and have them join in. This helps but unless they know what they are doing will most likely waste funds or get the boys killed by walking in front of waves. Once they get used to the controls though the second pair of hands can make the difference from failure and success, so this is where Xbox Live comes in with multiplayer.

This makes sense its great having a game that you can play and a mode which is bordering on difficulties so hard you will need the extra help; if you could get a game that is. Sadly this is and will be South Parks failing along with most other casual XBLA titles that add multiplayer elements. Great for the first few days, but days or weeks later you will need people on your friends list with the game and willing to play to have some fun online with it. Which is a shame as this is possibly the perfect old school multiplayer party game where you can switch controllers and anyone can have a laugh listening to the classic lines from south park and its laughable attempt at a storyline introduced by Eric ‘it’s a conspiracy’ Cartman.

The game is very replayable due in-part to its comedy factor, and the vault of unlockables you can attain from it such as alternative characters from the series such as Timmy and Jimmy, Butters, Wendy, Craig. Basically every kid from class ten is in the game. Clips from South Park’s funnier moments are added for your enjoyment but remain fully relevant to the game showing you the origin of some enemies if you’re not familiar with certain ones.

While the story is rather flimsy to say the least which is merely in place as a reason for the game to exist, the gameplay itself is very solid with all types of enemies being weak to certain towers and you having to use your brain to strategically place towers some sets are weak against, while building a maze to heard the enemies in and stop them from reaching the town. Expect to be challenged later on with boss fights from time to time but these are essentially spray and pray affairs throwing all you have at them.

South Park comes down to two basic decisions One – How much do you love the series? Two – Are you willing to put in the time required to complete the game? If you answered yes to both of these then you can be safe in the knowledge you going to have a good time playing, with a host of things to attain including the games super hard achievement ‘Manbearpig’ which asks you to complete one of the hardest stages on insane difficulty with nothing but walls and snowballs. Previous experience with other Tower Defense games will most likely give someone a leg up on how to do such a task but it is still a feat to achieve. If on the other hand you said No to those questions, stay away. I’m sure you will only be disappointed at wasting your points.

But the beauty is you can always try the trail of the game to see if you will enjoy tower defense style gameplay or not coated in a nice triple coat of South Park humour. While there remain worse games on the marketplace for the price tag of 800 Microsoft Points, there most certainly are better out there to be downloaded for your enjoyment.