South Park: Snow Day is an authentic, but repetitive co-op curse ’em up

There was a time, back in the early days of South Park, when it seemed like the series was destined never to succeed in video game form.

With the licence in the hands of Acclaim, between 1998 and 2000 South Park got an FPS (using the Turok 2 engine), a karting game and a party game, none of which were considered stone-cold classics. A decade later, a pair of Xbox 360 digital exclusives – Let’s Go Tower Defense Play and Tenorman’s Revenge – were fine, but failed to set the world alight.

It wasn’t until Ubisoft stepped forward with its pair of RPGs, The Stick of Truth and The Fractured But Whole, that South Park finally received video game adaptations that not only faithfully replicated the show’s outrageous humour, but crucially were also great fun to play.

Now Cartman and co are back in South Park: Snow Day, but this time Ubisoft isn’t involved. As part of a $900 million development deal with ViacomCBS in 2021 (which includes spin-off movies for Paramount+), creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have made Snow Day in-house through South Park Digital Studios, along with Californian developer Question.

While the initial trailer for Snow Day didn’t exactly get players as excited as Ubisoft’s games did, after playing through the final game, we’re happy enough with it, if not entirely overwhelmed. The switch from Ubisoft’s authentic 2D-like visuals to polygonal characters gave us flashbacks of that 1998 Acclaim FPS, but in reality, there’s no need to worry about that.

The plot is straightforward enough. An enormous snowstorm is causing havoc in South Park, killing many residents and massively inconveniencing others. The kids are happy because it means school’s cancelled, so they head outside to play in the snow.

As in The Stick of Truth, the kids decide to pretend they’re in a fantasy setting, and as one of four ‘New Kids’ – the same gimmick applied in Ubisoft’s previous games to let you create your own avatar – you team up with Cartman to find out who’s behind the snowstorm.

Snow Day is designed for four players, though if you play with fewer than that, you’ll be accompanied by bots making up the numbers. This also means you can play solo, which is perfectly fine, as long as you can accept the obvious inevitability that sometimes your AI partners don’t go where you want.

The game is a third-person hack and slash game, where you’re armed with a melee weapon and a ranged weapon. As you progress through the game’s five stages you unlock a couple more of each, giving you a handful of loadout choices – do you play defensively with a sword/shield and arrows combination, or go all-in with a flamethrower wand and a two-handed axe? The possibilities are… well, limited, but they’re enough.

As well as your weapons, you can choose two special powers, which can be activated with L1/LB and R1/RB. These are also unlocked over time and range from planting a healing totem for a limited time, to fart-blasting your way into the sky to avoid danger, to drugging your enemies with cat urine to make them fight for you. Just in case it wasn’t clear this was a South Park game.

The game is roguelike to an extent, and expects multiple attempts. There are only five stages, each of which is split into around five smaller sections. Each section has you either clearing all the enemies you encounter, or carrying out a basic task, be that finding objects or lighting fires.

“Powers range from planting a healing totem for a limited time, to fart-blasting your way into the sky to avoid danger, to drugging your enemies with cat urine to make them fight for you”

There’s also a mild random element to the stages – while some sections are the same each time you play, others pull from a small selection of potential tasks to avoid it feeling like the exact same experience each time.

On one playthrough you may have to steal porn mags from sixth-graders chasing you a flame-throwing snowplough, while on the next you could be collecting ‘buckets of NFTs’ for Stan’s uncle Jimbo (“Oh, I looked it up,” he says when you deliver them, “and it turns out NFTs are total bullshit. But thanks anyway, kid.”)

On each run, you can collect toilet paper, a temporary resource you can use to upgrade power-up cards for that run only—once the run ends, you lose it all. You can also collect Dark Matter, which you retain. After each run, you can visit Mr Hankey and spend Dark Matter to upgrade your stats permanently on a skill tree.

The idea, then, is to play on the highest difficulty level you can (to collect the greatest rewards), dying multiple times and spending Dark Matter to keep upgrading and making yourself ever more powerful. If you’re not interested in any of this, it’s possible to just lower the difficulty and play through the game in a single run, though naturally this makes it possible to beat the game in 4-5 hours.

There’s lots to like about Snow Day. We were initially concerned about the move to polygonal characters, but in reality, it takes very little time to adjust to it. This is helped greatly with the facial animations, which do a fantastic job of making the characters still look and feel like their TV show counterparts despite no longer having that trademark papercraft appearance. During some cutscenes, it’s very easy to forget you’re playing a 3D game because it just feels like you’re watching South Park.

A huge part of this is also down to the writing and voice acting, which is top-drawer. The heavy involvement by South Park Digital Studios means that the story and dialogue are authentically South Park and feel in no way watered down. Parker co-wrote the game with Jameel Saleem – that the pair previously wrote The Fractured But Whole together should indicate how well Snow Day nails it too.

“During some cutscenes, it’s very easy to forget you’re playing a 3D game because it just feels like you’re watching South Park. A huge part of this is also down to the writing and voice acting, which is top-drawer.”

Special mention must also go to the music, which is much better than it has any right to be. The music during Stage 4 is some of the best we’ve heard in a long time in any game, offering epically dramatic rock with Stranger Things-style bridges. We expected to be impressed by the dialogue, but the score took us by surprise.

Ultimately, however, the main issue we have with Snow Day is that it gets repetitive quickly. The combat is fine, and there’s a reasonable variety of enemies, but by the time you reach the end of the fifth and final stage, you’ve fought a lot of them many times over. This is expected in a game of this nature – Left 4 Dead being an example that springs to mind – but we nevertheless felt familiarity fatigue setting in, and by ten hours, we felt like we were just going through the numbers each time.

The repetitive nature is also exacerbated by the game’s Snow Day title. South Park is 27 years old now, with more than 320 episodes, so there’s a wealth of content to draw from there, including when it comes to possible locations. Instead, 95% of the game takes place outside in the snow, and it does get quite boring looking at white battlefields all the time. Some stages even revisit certain areas, which for a game with only five levels is poor.

It says it all that a brief stint inside a cinema is one of the most memorable moments in the game, purely because it gives us something different to look at. We’d have loved the chance to explore other South Park locations in 3D, but instead, we mainly had to make do with the streets, the rooftops and the countryside.

It’s also a shame that you have to play as a ‘New Kid’ for the third game running. It seems there’s more content to come – the Digital Deluxe edition comes with a Season Pass – and given that there’s a third currency aimed at unlocking cosmetics, it’s clear the aim is to make players continue to customise their own bespoke characters. And yet, given that it’s a four-player game, it’s crying out for the option to just play as Cartman, Stan, Kyle and Kenny.

All this said, we still had a fun time with Snow Day and $30 / £25 for the standard edition is a fair price given how relatively light it is on content. There’s free DLC on day one, which adds a Horde mode, but this just turns the repetitive nature up to 11.

As The Stick of Truth eventually led to The Fractured But Whole, we hope Snow Day isn’t a one-off, and that its engine is used for more South Park games. Playing co-op with three other generic ‘New Kids’ didn’t do it for us this time, but we’d kill to play a full single-player adventure with this engine, featuring a wider variety of South Park environments to explore (South Park Elementary, the South Park Mall, Little Tokyo, City Hall etc).

For now, this is a fun enough diversion for the price – especially if you can find three others to play it with you – as long as you’re aware of its relatively lightweight nature.