South Park: Snow Day! Review – DOES IT SUCK?

What’s this? A 3D South Park game? We haven’t seen one of these since Nintendo’s controllers looked like bloomin’ batarangs. Who thought that was a good design? But seriously, is there anything special about South Park: Snow Day! other than its AA price point? And the fact that it’s not another turn-based RPG? Well, let’s plough on through.

We Don’t Need No Education

If there’s one thing you’ll be doing in Snow Day a lot, it’d be real-time fighting wave after wave of kids dressed up in cute little battle gear. Yet again, you play as the aptly-named New Kid who is silent and strangely OP for no particular reason. Albeit, with the help of three other New Kids—whether they be bots or co-op randos online—they’ll hopefully stop the nasty, nasty blizzard that Cartman prayed for at the start of the game, simply because he didn’t want to attend school the next day. Sounds about right.

The humour in Snow Day is actually gold though, playing out like an extended South Park episode with all sorts of silly shenanigans. Cartman is up to his usual skullduggery as the Grand Wizard, whereas Kenny appears as a pop diva princess boss spouting nonsense. It’s some good times, even if several in-game comments are repeated far too often. Since the main content of this Snow Day is roughly 4 hours long, you’d expect there to be plenty of unique lines to put a smile on our dials, but that just isn’t the case, unfortunately.

The action battle system is surprisingly good, however. Each New Kid’s appearance, perks and load-outs can be completely customised before sledding into the game’s five chapters, with three different melee and ranged weapons to choose from, alongside two special abilities that recharge in the heat of combat—or cold of combat, I should say here. It certainly is fun to mix and match your load-outs, and they can be upgraded at points, rogue-lite style within a single chapter’s run. This gives each session a distinct flavour since you can’t exactly predict which power-ups or effects you can choose from. But if the word “rogue-lite” scares you a touch, don’t worry. Whenever the whole party gets wiped, you’ll only have to restart the current chapter again, not the whole game itself.

4-Player Melee Madness

That being said, the difficulty can get quite challenging, especially towards the end. I played through Snow Day on Normal mode and only wiped once due to someone being AFK. Well, at least that’s what I’m going with. But there were several occasions that brought me to the brink, as teaming up with AI bots can go sideways fast, especially if they decide to run off and charge full speed ahead into the Shadow Realm. 

Each side does have a few trump cards up their sleeve to swing things around, luckily. Appropriately labelled ‘Bullshit’, these mega-powerful, limited-use cards are selected and revealed at the beginning of a chapter for both teams. When in battle, you can summon ravaging meteors, go all big-body, big-damage mode for a short spell and more, truly devastating the opposition if they’re deployed at the right time. And of course, there are more than a few ways to cheese the enemy AI in terms of positioning and specific weapon attacks, because they’re definitely not the smartest tools in the shed.

The game’s level design does lend itself well to the action though, with an adequate amount of unique set pieces and interactable elements like cannons and bouncy pads to keep the gameplay fresh. I only wish the combat had more impact to its sword strikes and magical blasts. It just looks and feels a tad too thin, which honestly makes the combat seem less substantial than it should be. Plus, the boss battles have a strange difficulty curve to them, with some of the latter encounters being much easier than you’d expect. There’s practically nothing to do outside of fighting either, and I wasn’t able to try out the horde mode DLC as well. It simply did not want to work.

Decision

Ultimately, South Park: Snow Day! makes for a pretty decent 3D action game. While it certainly isn’t as compelling or impactful as its turn-based RPG predecessors, this title contains an enjoyable amount of player customisation and encounters that can be deceptively difficult, especially when the AI goes off the rails. However, the level design does help to keep the 4-player combat engaging, with RNG-based rogue-lite elements sprinkled in for some extra variety. Couple all of this with that classic brand of South Park humour we all know and love, and Snow Day’s 4-hour escapades might just be worth a play session or two.

By Anthony Culinas – Reviewed on PC

Good

While it may not be as riveting as its turn-based contemporaries, South Park: Snow Day! showcases an enjoyable 3D action battle system built for 4 players online, combined with the iconic comedic writing of Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

This game was reviewed using a download code provided by THQ Nordic. The Beta Network uses affiliate partnerships, however, this does not influence reviews or any other content published. The Beta Network may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links that are on the website.