With Stick of Truth and Fractured but Whole, South Park showed everyone it can be great games too and now South Park is back with a third game, this time around it’s a four-player co-op experience. While this game isn’t nearly on the same scale in scope and gameplay elements, it’s still a delightful experience.
It is snowing!
It all starts with snow and lots of it. The story of South Park: Snow Day is as the title suggests about a snow day like no other in South Park. The storm is killing people left and right and school is closed, so the kids naturally go out to play. The story takes place after the previous gaming entries and early on even some great jokes about those games and how they ended. While Fractured but Whole gave us superpowers, Snow Day takes it back to the fantasy known from Stick of Truth and it is all about finding out why and who started this storm.
Like a good episode of the series
If you are a fan of South Park and its humor, you will feel right at home here. The game plays out like an episode of the series and a great episode at that. The jokes hit the right spot throughout the game which goes from small giggles to loud laughter, almost waking up the kids at home. While I do enjoy classic South Park jokes, some of the best jokes are about video games and the video game logic, like how you are the chosen one, even if you are player 4 in a group.
Card game?
The game is divided into five chapters. At the start of each chapter, you choose cards that will help you in the upcoming quest and after every checkpoint during the chapter. Some cards enhance your weapons and skills, and other cards give you ultimate power with a few uses, also called Bullshit-cards. The cards are made to look like a kid’s homemade cards and the aesthetic is amazing and does look like something I made as a kid. While these cards change how your weapons and skills behave, giving you some variation in gameplay, it doesn’t change that much and I wished they would have gone further here to make different builds feel more fun and special.
Weapons and skills
The gameplay that follows and makes up for the bulk of the game is pretty standard when it comes to these types of games. Together with friends or Ai you go from A to B and kill enemies on the route, or you hold a point from waves of enemies, nothing special but also nothing bad. Both the moment and the combat feel a little slow, pacing this up really would have made the game feel a lot nicer and something hampering my experience at times. To kill enemies you have three different range weapons and three different melee weapons to choose from and you can by the end pick two skills from six different. Here I wish they had added some more options and variations within the options. Because no matter what you choose, they all play very similar.
Short but sweet
The weapons aren’t the only limitation of the game. As mentioned earlier there are five chapters and each chapter can be played in 30-50 min, making this a rather short experience. There are some reasons to replay levels, such as challenges to complete and different costumes to unlock, but after the story, I found it hard to justify going back for fun. While live service games aren’t a positive word these days, there are great exceptions, and South Park: Snow Day could have been one. I want to play more but a few challenges during the chapters and a few costumes to unlock don’t do it for me. More weapons and maybe armor, a leveling system, and more difficulty levels would have had me playing a lot more. But still, the lower price tag works well with a shorter game.
There are a few boss fights in the game and while they mechanically might not be more than average, their presentation is amazing, from both the story, music, and visuals, which is why they hit that South Park spot. One of the boss fights includes Kenny, and it is by far the funniest fight I have encountered in a long time.
Do not play with the AI
You should play this game with other players, and it works well with randoms. Trying to play it alone with AI friends is a real hassle since they are really stupid. Teammates can revive you if you fall, but the AI can run in circles and sometimes in the wrong direction when you need it. So if you do need a revive with AI, either wait forever or crawl slowly towards them. While it is a well-working co-op game, I would have preferred shorter maps and no checkpoints over the current system with fem chapters and many checkpoints, which would have made it possible to drop in for ten minutes and still make progress.
Conclusion
South Park: Snow Day isn’t perfect in any way, it is a simple and short experience filled with questionable design decisions at times. But I still had a blast with the game from start to finish. If you like South Park you will enjoy this game. When I was 10 we had a big snowstorm one night that ended with a snow day with the schools closed, and this game captured that same feeling I had back then. Which is by far the best grade a game called Snow Day can get.
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