Summary

• Lackluster gameplay, floaty characters, and uninteresting powers plague South Park: Snow Day.
• The humor and writing in Snow Day fall flat, with weak comedy and inconsistent sound design.
• Snow Day is best suited for die-hard South Park fans looking for basic combat and co-op gameplay.

South Park: Snow Day is the latest entry in the South Park video game series which began with The Stick of Truth and was followed by The Fractured But Whole. Developed by Question (of The Magic Circle and The Blackout Club fame) and published by THQ Nordic, Snow Day sets itself apart from the previous two entries in its franchise by eschewing the show-accurate animation style of its predecessors and instead displays both the town of South Park and its characters as fully modeled 3D characters. The result, in combination with the game's plot, is heavily reminiscent of South Park for the N64, at least in of theme and visuals.

There are a few things to like about Snow Day. Player abilities, which are represented by crudely drawn playing cards clearly meant to have been made by the kids themselves, are appropriately equal parts vulgar and ridiculous. The story itself considers both Stick of Truth and Fractured But Whole canon without being an actual sequel, with the player character ostensibly being the same New Kid from both of those previous adventures. As such, many of your powers will once again come from farting, a premise which has unfortunately already had most of its enjoyment squeezed out of it before the game really starts.

Snow Way To Say This Easier

A Struggle To Find The Fun

South Park: Snow Day does not always feel great to play. The characters are floaty, the attacks lack any feeling of weight or heft, and the otherwise cool-sounding special powers players can access (like laser eye heat vision or the ability to grow large and smash your opponents) are uniformly lackluster. Gone is the role-playing gameplay of Fractured But Whole - most of your time in Snow Day simply consists of waddling around in the snow and mashing the attack button to make it through waves of barely dangerous NPCs, and the mid-game "Bullshit card" activations (which causes certain rules to change during missions, like replacing all your melee weapons with useless pool noodles) are more annoying than mechanically interesting.

South Park: Snow Day is a co-op arena battler with only the basics of combat and the basics of South Park holding it together.

As a video game, playing South Park: Snow Day feels more like playing a re-skinned version of Back 4 Blood with even more edges sanded off. Players begin in the Kupa Keep, a cordoned-off section of backyards behind Cartman's house which acts as a hub where you can purchase upgrades or outfit changes, swap out weapon loadouts, and select which string of missions you want to go on. Snow Day is built around co-op play, although bots will appear to fill the empty roster if you prefer to play offline, and while there is a story which acts as a through-line it's clear these "plot" missions are meant to be replayed more than once. There's also a horde mode which Henrietta unlocks after the second mission, which players can attempt as many times as they want for extra rewards and replay value.

The ability to upgrade cards between areas brings something approaching tactics to the table, but in practice no choice ever feels vital over the other. Arenas come in "defeat all the enemies," "defeat all the waves of enemies," and "complete the objective while either defeating or avoiding enemies" varieties, with each string of missions ending in a boss battle against one of the more prominent of South Park's cast. None of these battles are overtly challenging in any aspect, and each string of missions can be completed in roughly 15-30 minutes.

Taylor Swift and Toiler Paper

Comedy Circa 2020

Being a South Park property, one hopes humor would carry the lesser aspects of the game on its shoulders to at least deliver an enjoyable playtime session. Unfortunately, the writing and line delivery in South Park: Snow Day is the weakest out of all three New Kid entries thus far. I try not to criticize humor in games too much because it's such a subjective element, but it's inexcusable here. The entire game seems trapped in some sort of 2021 post-covid haze, where toilet paper is the commodity every adult in town hoards and "weak, gullible people" are placated with a literal barrel of NFTs. It is satire in its absolute weakest form, and considering how biting and poignant South Park can be it is simply embarrassing to see its comedy stoop so low here.

One thing that can't be criticized is how nice the actual town of South Park looks here. Despite the piles of snow and mud which makes traversal cumbersome, it's still incredibly nice to see iconic locations like City Wok and Jimbo's Guns rendered in 3D. If the world was littered with hidden gags like The Simpsons Hit & Run, or literally anything other than generic item crates filled with in-game currency, arena exploration would be enjoyable.

Bad comedy is made worse by bad sound. Characters in South Park: Snow Day often feel as if they are in different rooms from one another, with audio quality varying drastically between single line reads in the same conversation and volume levels of nearby NPCs seemingly unaffliliated with how far away they actually are to you. Certain animations and particle effects also seem to be unreliably consistent at the best of times - I chose to stick with a flame-spurting wand for the majority of my playthrough, but pressing the fire button seemed to only activate the jets of flame about 75% of the time. In these instances, I had to rely on just an orange lighting effect on the snow and damage numbers over the enemy's heads to confirm that, yes, I was actually attacking.

Who This Is For

Four Kids With Extremely Low Standards

South Park: Snow Day goes out of its way numerous times to ensure players know that they are the one, special "New Kid," and all the other "New Kids" are ignorable, unimportant losers. It's meta-humor of the weakest quality, but low-effort comedy is par for the course here. Constantly degrading the main character while simultaneously reassuring them that hey are important creates this weird juxtaposition where the New Kid feels even more unnecessary to the plot than in past South Park video games.

It's hard to determine exactly who Snow Day is meant to be for. The ideal player of South Park: Snow Day has three other friends who are extremely into South Park, to the point of enjoying anything with the character's faces painted on it, and those three friends also enjoy battling waves upon waves of unintelligent NPC fodder with single button mashes while occasionally pressing one of two other buttons to execute an ability. These four friends should also laugh hilariously at the idea of a Taylor Swift album fetching "nearly half a roll" on the toilet paper black market - honestly, if that one joke doesn't snag you, it's all downhill from there.

South Park: Snow Day is a co-op arena battler with only the basics of combat and the basics of South Park holding it together, and unless you are absolutely dying to see the snow-covered town represented in three dimensions for the first time since 2000's South Park Rally, it can safely be skipped.

South Park: Snow Day releases on March 26, 2024, for the PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch. Screen Rant was provided a PS5 code for the purposes of this review.