South Park: Snow Day!
WHERE TO PLAY
South Park: Snow Day is a 4-player co-op adventure set in the universe of the famous TV show.
It’s been a while since we’ve seen aSouth Parkgame grace our screens, and the kids are donning their foam weapons and makeshift armor again for another high fantasy adventure in South Park: Snow Day! (The exclamation mark is part of the title; I’m not trying to overhype it.)
If you’re coming in blind and expecting another turn-based RPG likeThe Stick of TruthorThe Fractured But Whole, you might want to change your expectations. This time around, the boys of South Park are going 3D, with anaction-packed, squad-based combat systemthat you’ll follow through five chapters. The game is designed for two to four players in online co-op, with bots filling up any of the empty party slots. You can also play the game as a solo campaign, but it’s not really what the game was designed for, and going it alone hurts the overall experience.
Please Play With Your Friends (Or Randos)
I say this because the bots are kinda dumb. Enemies in this game have great preservation instincts and will retreat and regroup when they’re low on health. Your AI friends? Not so much. Of course, if they go down, you can revive them by standing near them for a while, but when your party is being swarmed by enemies, that’s not always easy to do, and if everyone goes down at once, you’re kicked out and will have to restart the entire chapter, potentially losing about an hour of progress.
Trying to play through Chapter 3 solo was maddeningly frustrating. At one point, you’ll steal a sixth-grader’s nudie magazine, and he’ll chase you through a closed arena in a flame-throwing death tank. (Don’t ask how a sixth-grader gets one of those.) You’ll only be able to take a couple of hits from the tank before you go down, and the arena is also full of enemies to fight and three switches you’ll have to charge up to escape.
Well and good, except all three of my bot companions failed to run away from the killdozer and went down in roughly the same spot, where the mechanical beast was waiting for me. No rezzing those guys! I had to fight all the enemies myself, and while I thought the battles dragged on too long before, this was an exercise in tedium worthy of The Duncan Principle. (It’s from Community; look it up.)
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Come On Down To … South Park?
Cartman makes it very clear that you’rethenew kid, for the sake of story and cutscenes, but there are three other new kids as well, whether they’re controlled by fellow humans or the game itself. If you’re riding solo, at the start of each stage, every bot will be randomly designed, so prepare yourself for a hodgepodge group of green-haired kids who look like they got dressed in the dark. Otherwise, your party has whatever motif each player picks out.
Speaking of dress, the character creation system isn’t half bad, if a little off-the-point. All the kids in town are playing a classic high-fantasy LARP, and while there are cloaks and helmets you can equip, there’s also much more mundane and silly items, like a Raisins tee shirt or a dinosaur hat, which doesn’t really fit the theme, unless you’re roleplaying as a kobold or something. Still, there’s plenty here to capture the joy of being a kid cobbling together your own battle suit and heading out on a magical quest.
… seeing the characters' simple facial parts floating around isometric, flesh-colored blobs doesn’t always make me feel like I’ve stepped into the quiet little mountain town.
From a graphic standpoint, you may tell this is still definitely South Park, especially if you’re a fan of the show. A lot of familiar locations, like Stark’s Pond and Hell’s Pass Hospital, have been recreated in 3D, and while you can see characters from all angles instead of the standard front, back, and two side views that the cut-out style of the show (and the previous games) follows, there are enough details there to let you know which character you’re interacting with at any one time.
Still, looking at the characters in the game, something just feels a little bit off.Across its 327 (so far) episodes, South Park the show has rarely broken its trademark aesthetic, and while cut-out characters moving in just the four cardinal directions wouldn’t really work in this style of game, just seeing the characters' simple facial parts floating around isometric, flesh-colored blobs doesn’t always make me feel like I’ve stepped into the quiet little mountain town.
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Who Are All These People?
Additionally, another strike against Snow Day is that you’ll rarely fight alongside any of the main cast. Butters acts as an advisor, Jimmy will give you bonuses at certain points, and you’ll get a chance to battle against Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Cartman at specific points, but I can only remember one stage where any of them (Cartman, if you’re wondering) actually fought alongside me. You’ll run across some other familiar faces like Token and Tweek in the camp, but not in the field.
There are some fun cameos, including Randy popping in a couple of times to give me two of the three laugh-out-loud moments in the roughly five-hour campaign (the shoujo anime-inspired boss fight with Princess Kenny was the third), but for the most part, you’ll be wailing on glorified background characters for most of the game. I can’t describe just how fun it is to beat up kindergartners and have them lazily flop over and tell you “I’m dead” in a monotone voice, but that magic really doesn’t last long.
Arm Yourself For An Epic Battle
As far as the base combat, it’s actually pretty solid, but I do have a few gripes. You’ll get a melee weapon and a ranged weapon, as well as two powers that you can equip, and you’ll charge your power meter by using your weapons on enemies — simple enough.
The weapons don’t really scale well, though. You’ll start the game with a pair of daggers, which strike fast and relatively hard, and can cause bleed damage. Later on, you can unlock the sword and shield combo. While you can block with the shield and charge it up to perform a shield bash, which breaks the blocks of any enemies who are also equipped with shields, the sword itself feels really weak, and from Chapter 2 on, you’ll often get overrun with enemies who are absolute damage sponges, which can really make the battles drag on far too long.
Stan’s road sign axe … completely invalidates the need to ever go back to the other two weapons.
Upon completion of Chapter 3, you unlock Stan’s road sign axe, which is a good weapon — too good, in fact, as its charged spin completely invalidates the need to ever go back to the other two weapons. It’s really fun to use, but some damage scaling is needed to make the daggers and sword relevant.
As for ranged weapons, you start with a basic bow, later getting a magic staff that can lob fireballs in an arc and a wand that acts as a flamethrower. The staff is my pick of the three just based on the cards you can use to upgrade it (more on those in a minute), but there’s definitely some appeal in the range of the bow and the utility of the wand.
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The Mightiest Of Powers (That I Rarely Used)
As powers go, there are eight to pick from, and they vary from restoring health to increasing mobility to reflecting ranged attacks. I only really found the healing one to be very useful, but unfortunately, instead of healing you directly, it places a temporary totem that deals out tiny doses of health over time, which is frustrating when your companions are down and the enemies are Zerg-rushing your location.
But the biggest game changer of all is the array of cards that you’ll play at the prep table and collect throughout each chapter. After picking your weapon and power loadout, you’ll be offered a random selection of cards that apply to your specific weapons and powers. This can be fantastic when you get a card that turns your axe whirlwind attack into a vortex that draws enemies in and breaks their shields, but just as often, you’ll get a bunch of near-useless crap for all three cards, guaranteeing a slow, plodding slogfest. Bear in mind that enemies get cards too, and some — like the ones that makes all enemies permanently generate a cold aura that saps away your health whenever you’re in melee range — are so overpowered and broken that they make me just want to die and start the stage over.
There are also Bullshit powers (don’t blame me, that’s what they’re called), which can only be used a few times per stage, and grant temporary boosts like turning you giant and letting you stomp enemies or increasing your movement speed for a while. Again, these are nice, but it’s just as likely that your enemies get even better ones, and if the bad guys decide to turn all your weapons into worthless pool noodles when you’re facing down a massive horde of enemies, you might have to get ready to go all the way back to the hub and start the chapter from scratch.
Overall, South Park: Snow Day is a fine game for what it is, with five fun boss fights and a few laugh-out-loud moments, but it pales in comparison to the last two entries from Matt Stone and Trey Parker. Most of the humor is only worthy of a silent chuckle, weapons and cards are unbalanced, fights drag on and on, and the “cancel culture is bad” moral lesson just seems lazily tacked onto the ending, which is sad, because South Park is at its best when its crass humor is teaching you a lesson that you’ll only figure out in the end.
That said, for all its shortcomings, it is a fun little multiplayer combat game that’s best enjoyed with friends, which is what it set out to be. Just don’t expect The Stick of Truth 2.
