South Park: Snow Day moves away from the gorgeous 2D RPG style of Ubisoft’s Stick of Truth and Fractured But Whole and moves towards a 3D hack-and-slash affair with online co-op, boring combat and an overall PS2-budget game vibe that isn’t totally charmless, but is a huge disappointment after the two strong games before it.
Snow Day opens with a bait-and-switch 2D cutscene in the style of the show, one of the very rare 2D cutscenes you’ll see. In the opening, Cartman wishes for snow so bad it’ll close school, which comes true while also causing a snowstorm that freezes people in blocks of ice, kills multiple civilians and causes everyone to scrounge for necessities. However, school is closed, so it’s a win.
With school out, the gang get back together to reform the fantasy adventures found in the Stick of Truth. As a canonical sequel to The Fractured But Whole, you play as the New Kid as you battle against different foes in a lame hack-and-slash level-based RPG.
Unlike the past games’ single-player adventures with a lovable party of South Park’s crude and hilarious citizens, you’re now teamed up with three other New Kids. Of course, you’re “New Kid #1”, but your friends’ custom characters can also come along for the ride.
Unfortunately, there simply isn’t much of a ride to go on here. You’re treated to five 50-minute levels with random modifiers that you hack and slash your way through. There are additional difficulties to play through for those who want to, but Snow Day is horrendously barebones, especially compared to the pedigree that Ubisoft’s 20-hour-plus games were in the past.
Snow Day has the aura of a PS2 game surrounding it, but not a good one. It’s not a Ratchet and Clank or Devil May Cry 3, but instead a Fight Club or The Simpsons: Skateboarding. It’s a thin idea spread even thinner by a shoestring budget that’s already being pulled too tight to work with its pristine IP.
In fact, Snow Day is most reminiscent of the South Park games we used to get prior to The Stick of Truth. The infuriating corpses of games like Chef’s Luv Shack and South Park Rally must’ve been part of the ritual that summoned Snow Day, otherwise, humanity is to blame for this tragedy. When the free-to-play gacha game South Park: Phone Destroyer has more charm than this premium experience, you know something is wrong.
That’s not to say South Park: Snow Day is all bad. While its hack-and-slash combat is mind-numbingly tedious, there is some charm to some of the boss fights. An anime-themed boss battle against Princess Kenny isn’t the most exciting from a gameplay perspective, but it’s cute and inventive — even if that theme has already been done in the show and games nearly a decade ago.
Furthermore, the game’s card mechanics allow for enough variety to keep going through the game’s short campaign. With these modifiers, you can have multi-element wands or healing totems that harm enemies. It’s not fully fleshed out, but it’s a cute mechanic that just barely holds the experience together. There’s also a dedicated fart button on the right D-Pad button which gives you an achievement. I’m sure that’s going towards the score.
However, the absolute worst part about the new South Park is that it feels so woefully outdated. Even outside of the archaic gameplay, Snow Day is regurgitating a theme used ten years ago with jokes mostly revolving around the COVID pandemic that were done in the show back in 2020. Of course, games take a while to make, but maybe it’s not worth making a topical game if you’re going to miss the topic by almost four years.
South Park: Snow Day includes very little content, but I can’t say I’m hoping for more. Hopefully, developer Question LLC — the team behind the fairly strong Blackout Club — can go back to creating the original games they’ve been praised for in the past instead of sticking to an expensive, budget-eating license. This team can certainly do better, and we’ve seen it.
Reviewed on PC with code provided by the publisher.
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