South Park: Snow Day! - Switch Review

The irreverent comedy stylings of Trey Parker and Matt Stone return to the world of gaming with South Park: Snow Day!, a direct sequel to their two previous critically acclaimed games South Park: The Stick of Truth and South Park: The Fractured But Whole. With the titular town of South Park assailed by an apocalyptic-level blizzard, people are freezing to death on the streets and supplies are low. While everyone in town is panicking and trying their hardest to survive, the kids on the other hand, only care about playing fantasy in the snow.

The Bad

I’m changing up the usual formula here we have at Switchaboo and starting off with the negatives because, boy, is there a lot wrong with this game. Let’s start off with the most obvious, the game’s art direction and the switch to 3D. Historically, 3D South Park games have always looked wrong and this game is no exception. While I do applaud the developers' use of rotoscoping to capture the animation style of the show as accurately as possible, the simple fact that the game is in 3D causes the style to not work and look cheap. Yes I’m aware South Park’s animation style is specifically meant to look cheap but it’s still charming, South Park: Snow Day! is just ugly.

As for the level design, well, it’s no mystery that 90% of the game is going to be covered in snow; I mean, it’s right there in the title. This leads to every level looking and feeling the same, which quickly exacerbates South Park: Snow Day!’s repetitive gameplay even quicker.

Oh right, I haven’t even gotten to the gameplay. So all of the promotional material for South Park: Snow Day! only mentions that the game is an online co-op beat ‘em up; what they neglected to mention is that the game is primarily a roguelike. Before each level, you equip yourself with weapons and upgrades, while each level is a series of combat rooms with some form of randomised roguelike elements to upgrade the build you came in with. Unfortunately, the majority of the bonuses you get between battles aren’t interesting or change your playstyle in any way. The closest I got to something interesting was the ability to leave a fart cloud, which I could then set alight and make a large explosion. In the end, it turned out to be a lot of work to do less overall damage than the basic melee combo. With each level lasting 30-45 minutes plus the aforementioned repetitive level design, South Park: Snow Day! becomes an absolute slog to play through.

But we’re not done; it gets worse! At first, I thought South Park: Snow Day! was too easy, only spawning in basic enemies which the AI party members could defeat without my help (the party is typically other players but it’s a little hard to play with three other people when you receive an advanced review copy), only for the game to quickly overwhelm you with, I’m using the game’s terms here, Bullshit enemies. You’ll have enemies that throw incorrectly sized explosive radius markers, bulky chargers that are pure damage sponges that can send you flying in the air or pin you to the ground to deal massive damage, or the enemy that truly brought my piss to a boil, a mage with the ability to make other enemies invincible and heal them. It is entirely possible for multiple of these mage enemies to spawn at once, causing them to make each other invincible, leaving you stuck in a literal unwinnable scenario.

But what about the writing? It’s a South Park game, so it should all be worth it to experience a new South Park story, right? Well, I hate to say it, but South Park: Snow Day!’s writing feels like an afterthought and is very clearly not up to the same quality Matt and Trey hold for the show. South Park: Snow Day!’s writing is very “Good job player, now do this”, interspersed with jokes about how people hoarded toilet paper during the pandemic and “haha, farts are funny”. Yes, the previous South Park games did rely on fart jokes a lot, but the overall tone and humour of those games were much more than that. Here, it’s one of two legs the game has to stand on.

And for the cherry on top, I’m not sure if this is exclusive to the Switch port but there is a VERY noticeable 1-2 second audio delay in every cutscene and sometimes even completely missing audio.

TL;DR

• Poor art direction
• Samey level design
• Tedious and boring combat
• Uninspired roguelike elements
• A frantic difficulty curve
• Enemies can softlock you and force you to restart levels
• Lacklustre writing
• Persistent audio issues

The Good

I had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find something positive to even say about South Park: Snow Day!, hence the flipped format of the review. I guess all I can really say is that South Park: Snow Day! has a consistent frame rate and doesn’t crash... The game functions.

TL;DR

• Consistent frame rate
• No perceivable crashes

Final Score: 2/10

South Park: Snow Day! is a miserable disappointment of a game; it is by far the WORST game I’ve reviewed here in my time at Switchaboo. I’d rather play the infamously terrible South Park first person shooter on the Nintendo 64 because at least that game was short.

Thank you for checking out our South Park: Snow Day! Switch review, thank you to THQ Nordic (via Dead Good Media) for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:

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