‘Member when Snow Days were fun?
If you were a child of the 90s then I am willing to bet that you have at least seen South Park. For myself I never stopped being a fan of Matt and Trey’s animated opus, and have enjoyed all of the games that has seen the kids from Phone Destroyer to of course The Stick of Truth and the Fractured but Whole. Well South Park: Snow Day continues the saga of the New Kid in South Park, the city shut down from a massive snow storm sees the kids go back to the Elves vs Humans from Stick of Truth. There is a pretty funny summary as Cartman explains why they had to stop playing Stick of Truth and Fractured but Whole; the reason is the New Kid got OP and ruined the game, its was a nice in universe explanation for those who have played all the games as the New Kid.
Snow Day is a hack and slash roguelite that instead of invoking the shows traditional 2D view, developer Question opts for a third person view of South Park. Honestly its not bad, I mean of course it looks better than the notorious N64 South Park games but its no where near as detailed as the Ubisoft South Park games. Players will visit locations like South Park Elementary, various stores on main street, etc. The problem is that these locations are mostly covered in snow and really just feel like cameos for buildings we have seen in the show than a real location that players can traverse. The hub world for the game is Kupa Keep, which is in Cartman’s backyard so players can’t even go into the fab four’s homes.
MSRP: $29.99
Platforms: PC (reviewed), Xbox, PlayStation, Switch
Price I’d Pay: $9.99
One of the reasons I have continued to love South Park is because of its witty, usually dark humor. In Snow Day that humor seems a bit muted so as to continue for a long time as most of the jokes reference past episodes and lots of poop. There are a lot of poop and fart jokes, players can even use farts as powers for their runs. It’s a shame that the creative team decided to backslide with this humor that feels like its from the early 00’s. South Park has grown so much more since then and truly deserves better.
As players go on runs in the five different levels, they will find a few currencies that will be used to upgrade their characters. Toilet Paper is basically money, it’s a snowstorm and that stuff has become gold. Dark Matter is what players use on an upgrade tree with Mr. Hankey to buff their health, attacks and other things. All this would be well and good if the actual game play went so bad. First and for most the camera control on the right stick is WAAAY to sensitive, I damn near got whiplash and it all went downhill from there. The movement and jumping all feel very floaty and weightless, combat itself devolves to frantic button mashing with a ranged weapon that only fires in an arc.
Players will be mowing down kindergarteners among other kids all dressed as Elves, once you have seen one you will have seen them all as they are extremely repetitive, as are the handful of things they exclaim as they fall in defeat. It becomes less funny like some of the things in the Ubisoft games and just becomes downright annoying at the repetitiveness of it all. If that’s not bad enough, the levels in this game are about as long as Cartman’s rap sheet and if you die during the level players will have to restart from the very beginning. There is no checkpoint system that I have seen, which again makes things overly repetitive.
I wanted to love this game, especially when I heard that Matt and Trey wanted this as an avenue to have a sort of metaverse with the show. So, events can happen in the show on one night and the next it picking up in the game. The premise is very cool, but sadly this game ain’t it. Its going to take a lot of patches and things to get this up to snuff, which is sad because it does some neat things. The different cards in game that work as powers for one, players can choose one ‘bullshit’ card to use which is some uber power like making someone vampires, or giving super strength. All of it with the vibe that these are still kids playing outside. Sadly, it’s all just wasted in its current state, I really hope the developers can turn this around because I want to go on down to South Park and meet some friends of mine.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
