About halfway through the first mission in South Park: Snow Day, I found myself pausing the game and checking my phone as I desperately looked for entertainment. That’s what we professional and very serious critics call: Not a good sign.
The Week In Games: Wild At Heart
Out now on Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, and PC, South Park: Snow Day is the latest video game adaptation of the long-running, popular, and sometimes controversial animated comedy. It’s also, technically, the follow-up to 2017’s The Fractured But Whole and 2014’s Stick Of Truth, two previous South Park 2D RPGs that I enjoyed even though I’m not really a fan of the main series. What made those games enjoyable was that, even if you didn’t enjoy South Park, the gameplay was fun and the writing was often funny. They were sometimes overly crude or “edgy,” sure, but there was still some charm in them. And if you enjoyed the show, those past games’ art styles were nearly identical to the animated series, so it felt like playing an episode of the actual South Park show.
South Park: Snow Day, on the other hand, lacks practically all of that charm and is just a budget-level bore.
A bad and bland South Park-themed adventure
Snow Day looks nothing like the show. It’s 3D and often, ironically, looks cheaper and cruder than the papercraft style of the beloved series. What doesn’t help is that Snow Day’s whole premise is that a large blizzard has hit the town, leading to a snow day for the kids, and tons of white fluffy snow and blue ice everywhere. At times the snow and lighting look nice, but I quickly found myself bored of every battle and area being covered in snow. Some of these environments also clash with the crude South Park character models, like someone ripped these assets from Roblox and dropped them in Unreal Engine.
Snow Day is also not much fun to play, replacing the not-innovative-but-reliable 2D RPG mechanics of the past games with a third-person shooter and melee-based combat system that revolves around cards and power-ups.
The idea is that the kids, split into different fantasy factions as seen in the past games, have developed a series of snowball fight rules and each battle must follow these guidelines. To help make sure nobody gets too powerful, the kids have added cards that can be unlocked, upgraded, equipped, or destroyed during each chapter. These chapters act as “runs” sort of like a roguelike, with the AI choosing its own cards to counter you and different cards being available between fights.
Chapters are broken into smaller chunks but these are all just a variation on “Fight 20 to 30 kids in a small arena for a bit.” Rarely did I enjoy fighting enemies over and over again using the same two or three abilities and attacks. Combat also feels imprecise and floaty in a way that makes me dread each encounter, not because they were challenging, but because they were dull.
Frustratingly, these chapters—which take about 50 to 60 minutes to complete—feel too long to be bite-sized but too short to really develop an interesting build. Oh and a heads up: There are only five chapters in the whole game and to unlock and earn everything you’ll be playing through them a few times, either alone or with other players online.
Snow Day lacks good or even bad jokes
Perhaps worst of all, South Park: Snow Day isn’t very funny. Not because I don’t like a crude joke or can’t “handle” the show’s gross or crass humor, but because there’s not much dialogue in the game at all. Battles are often filled with the same grunts, groans, and pain noises over and over, with generic music playing behind them. Occasionally South Park characters will point out how much you suck or how you are almost dead, but those quips are about as funny as a loading screen tip and become repetitive very fast.
After playing through the tutorial and the first two chapters, I found myself unable to push through more. While I do enjoy some of the snowy environments of the game and the opening cutscene feels very South Park in a way even I—a non-fan—can appreciate, Snow Day just feels too content light, boring, and simple to recommend.
Maybe a few diehard fans can group up and have some fun collecting toilet paper and talking to Mr. Hanky (the talking piece of shit) but there are so many better co-op games to play in 2024. And you should just play those instead.
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