South Park: Snow Day Review

South Park Snow Day takes a turn from the RPG genre and instead goes multiplayer. Is the switch a good choice, or should they have made another RPG? Check out our review here.

South Park: Snow Day Review

South Park Snow Day follows the exploits of the New Kid during a mysterious snowstorm. The New Kid is the same character from The Stick Of Truth and The Fractured But Whole. Since you got so overpowered in the last two games, the gang decides to start a new game with everyone at zero. This time, it is a fight between the various factions that inhabit South Park. You team up with Cartman to fight against the elves and Kyle. From there, you take on the rest of the kids until you collect the whole crew.

The story isn’t very deep, but you get some good South Park humor, and Cartman always takes a chance to poke fun at your mistakes. That is really how you get most of the story, anyway. While you are on your missions, they will contact you on the radio and tell you what is happening—more than once, I had to stop and chuckle at what they said.

For a game called Snow Day, you might expect it to be a snowball fighting game; it is not. It’s more of a brawler since you mostly use melee weapons and wands. The combos are simple but effective; just don’t expect a ton of depth. When you start a level, you and three other players(or bots) take on a series of stages to try and make it to a boss. To win a stage, you typically need to kill all enemy units. If you do win, you get an upgrade at the end of the stage, making the next one easier.

Outside of your basic attacks, you can also bring a couple of skills into a match. I liked to bring the fart escape, which leaves a fart cloud as you jet into the air. From there, I would upgrade it to linger longer and start it on fire. The bull rush was another fun one. Hitting enemies into the wall did a ton of damage, and it felt great to use. The only one I never turned off was my healing banner. If you get the right skill upgrades, it can have an increased radius and even revive downed allies. I’m sure there are other good combos, but combine the fire, poison gas, and my sword bleed damage, and I didn’t need to try much.

While in the match, you collect a few different things. Sometimes, you get lucky and get a skill card to boost a random skill. There is also toilet paper, which acts as currency due to the blizzard. You use this in between rounds to get stronger upgrades or shuffle which ones you can purchase. The big thing you will want to collect is the Dark Matter. You can find this off certain enemies or even in chests that drop down into the match. You can return to your hub with Dark Matter and get character upgrades. The skill tree is pretty simple, but if you want to fill it, you’ll have to play for quite a bit of time. Platinum coins are another currency, but that’s just for cosmetics.

Outside of the campaign, there is a wave defense mode. This mode allows you to grind more Dark Matter and unlock new cards. You get new cards by making achievements, like using moves several times, defeating certain enemies, and so on. One other thing in play is the BS cards. You can use these to get laser eyes and other superpowers. The enemy also gets them, and it will generally buff the baddies. They can be very annoying in survival mode since they happen nearly every round. Still, they add a bit more of a challenge to the battles.

As far as bugs are concerned, I ran into a blank card bug. So when I was going to pick an upgrade, nothing showed up, but I could still click to get an upgrade. It’s only a minor annoyance but a noticeable one. I didn’t have any crashes or notice any frame drops, but I was on my PC. Not sure how the consoles fare.

South Park Snow Day is a fun game that is a perfect fit for Game Pass or PlayStation Plus. I’d wait until it hits one of those services before checking it out.