Like being trapped indoors without power during an actual blizzard, playing South Park: Snow Day! had me frigidly wishing I could be anywhere else. A direct follow-up to the storyline of two excellent turn-based RPGs and a decent mobile spin-off, this cooperative 3D hack-and-slash admirably tries a lot of new things – but it throws the baby out with the bathwater in the process, leaving us with a monotonous, slipshod mess. The controls are awkward and clumsy, the weapons and abilities are limp and uninteresting, and even with only five levels that can be completed in as many hours, it still feels like it drags on for far too long. Worse than that though: all the humor and shocking moments for which South Park and its recent games are known is utterly missing in action, leaving little to recommend about this hollow, repetitious dud. I don’t know what we did to deserve going from a masterful Obsidian RPG that aptly captured South Park’s attitude to this, but boy does the fall hurt.
South Park: Snow Day! is a perplexingly boring third-person multiplayer game, where you and up to three of your unluckiest friends smack and blast your way through waves of samey first graders. Aside from some mildly interesting card-based leveling mechanics and an amusing one-liner here and there (like when Jimbo takes a well-deserved jab at NFTs) there are remarkably few glimmers of potential in this misadventure. But the vast majority of your time will be spent trudging through five levels of repetitive and tedious hack-and-slash combat that feels like it’s straight out of 2008 and never gets more interesting.
Even more disappointing is that it never once made me gasp or guffaw at an outrageous situation. South Park: The Stick of Truth saw us spelunking in Mr. Slave’s large intestine, dodging genitalia in the world’s most messed up rendition of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and questing in the two-dimensional and entirely accurately represented “country” of Canada. It was filled with hilarious moments that made me question how in the heck Ubisoft avoided an Adults Only rating from the ESRB. The same was largely true in the followup from Ubisoft’s internal studio, The Fractured But Whole. Snow Day returns to the Stick of Truth’s make-believe fantasy setting, but here you just occasionally fart every once in a while in lieu of actual jokes. Sure, there are some very minor moments that made me smile, like the final boss fight being a surprisingly timely reference to Dune, but those moments are so few and far between that they only ever served to get my hopes up before dashing them all over again. This is perhaps the most toothless South Park adventure ever created, which often feels like it’s directed towards actual children rather than the revolting reprobates, like me, who came here specifically to be shocked and disgusted.
The story is straightforward and one-note, as you and the South Park gang decide to continue your fantasy adventures during a snow day, and you proceed to fight against them and their hordes of minions in battle one at a time. The whole thing lasts about five hours and very little of note happens along the way – there are no big surprises, zero horrifying gross-out moments, and even the characters you know and love behave in a bizarrely tame fashion compared to how you’d expect after all these years. The wholly unhinged Randy makes a few appearances where he’s hoarding toilet paper, but never flies off the rails or delivers any memorable one-liners; even Cartman, whose entire personality is being the biggest monster imaginable, is mostly well-behaved the whole way through, despite briefly doing a stint as the bad guy himself. That appallingly flat writing makes an already bad game not even worth pushing through for a few laughs, and that’s an extremely hard pill to swallow as a decades-long South Park fan.
After setting the bar so low it was difficult to imagine, but the untidy, soulless combat that accounts for the vast majority of playtime is Snow Day’s biggest miss. You select one of three melee weapons (twin daggers, a sword and shield, or a battle ax) and one of three ranged weapons (a bow and arrow, a wizard’s staff, or a wand) to bring into battle, allowing for precious few options for how to play. Not that it matters, really, because thanks to the floaty and imprecise controls, none of these options feel good to begin with. Each of the ranged weapons does damage from afar, requiring a cooldown or charge time that’s so long it’s almost always not worth the trouble, while all three of the melee weapons are at least more reliable for damage, but don’t lock on to enemies, have awful hit detection, and when you do connect it feels a bit like dueling someone with a helium balloon.
The only other major tools in your arsenal are the two equally underwhelming powers you get to equip, selected from eight total options, which include stuff like a healing totem that regenerates nearby allies’ HP for a short amount of time, or a deployable turret that fires snowballs at passersby. These are at least more interesting than any of the base weapon options, but since they’re recharged by doing damage and scoring kills with your other weapons, definitely don’t solve the problems with combat.
One of Snow Day’s only good ideas are upgradeable cards that you collect as you fight through levels. These grant passive benefits and allow you to cultivate a build throughout each stage, then disappear once that level is over, adding a minor roguelike element to the adventure. You might find interesting cards that augment your healing totem, enabling it to do things like revive downed teammates, allow you to do more damage to enemies near it, or increase its area of effect. Or you can chase riskier cards, like one that turns your otherwise weak wand attack into a high-DPS flame-spewing hose that lights you on fire too as a tradeoff. While combat never stops being a sloppy, disappointing slog, collecting cards to augment your playstyle, then strategically leveling them up to make those abilities more powerful, injects a modicum of variety into it.
The issue is that Snow Day isn’t a roguelike in any other way. You don’t have to start the entire campaign over when you die (you just start at the beginning of that level), and even on the hardest difficulty, none of the levels are so challenging that you won’t probably beat them on the first try. So there’s not a ton of pressure to create a really solid build since there’s little to optimize for. And even if you do manage to assemble a deck of cards you like, each level ends after an hour or less, at which point you lose them all just as soon as the build starts coming together and go back to zero. I would love to see a better game try this idea, because here it’s implemented in a way that only barely improves an overwhelmingly bad time.
Another example of a poorly thought-out card mechanic is the single random Bullshit Card you get at the beginning of each level that lets you activate a more powerful ability a limited number of times. These might let you call down a rain of fiery meteors for straight DPS or recover your health and make you invisible for a short period of time to escape danger, but none of them are all that interesting and they only have a minor impact on gameplay since you can usually only cast them two or three times per level. What’s worse, though, is that enemies get Bullshit Cards too, and they do things like replace the enemy’s normal weapons with high-damage laser swords, or give the bad guys protective bubble shields that make them significantly more beefy. In most cases, these cards serve only to significantly draw out the length of combat (including pausing gameplay whenever the enemy uses one to watch the animation play out) which is already pretty unbearable to begin with.
This is especially true in the revolting horde mode (available as free DLC) in which you’re subjected to waves of enemies in an arena. This format really dials up all the worst parts of Snow Day and cuts out any hope of stumbling upon jokes or story along the way. In these nightmare scenarios, the enemies are given a whole bunch of Bullshit Cards and use them every couple of seconds, which constantly pauses the battle for the announcer to shout “bullshit” at you. It’s super cool and didn’t at all make me want to be buried alive.
