South Park: Snow Day!
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| South Park: Snow Day! | ||||||||||||||||
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 "You blew it! You had it all and you blew it!"
— Charles Kincade | ||||||||||||||||
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South Park: Snow Day! is a 2024 action-adventure game developed by Question LLC and published by THQ Nordic in association with South Park Digital Studios. The game is based on the South Park animated series. It is the fourth game in the South Park series where the player controls The New Kid, rather than one of the four boys after Stick of Truth, The Fractured but Whole, and Phone Destroyer.
Development
In 2021, Matt Stone and Trey Parker signed a $900 million development deal with ViacomCBS, with one of the projects announced being a new 3D South Park game in development that would be developed internally by South Park Digital Studios. In August 2022, the game was teased at THQ Nordic's digital showcase by a small teaser featuring a clip of Randy Marsh's voice exclaiming "Hot! Hot-hot-hot!", taken from the episode "More Crap" (2007). In August 2023, South Park: Snow Day! was officially announced for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S.
In an interview with South Park co-creator and project head Matt Stone, IGN likened the gameplay to that of a "roguelike". Stone remarked on the deviations from the series' previous RPG iterations, stating, "We always thought we wanted to do that thing where we do a thing in a show and then like, it's in the game two weeks later, or three weeks, or whatever it is." He also remarked the change from 2D to 3D allowed the development team more flexibility in how they built the game world, saying that creating a game on a 2D plane is "really, really hard when you think about what you have to work with."
The game was released on March 26, 2024, in both physical (on consoles) and digital formats, for the budgeted launch price of $ USD/$ CAD29.99. A collectors edition featuring a snow globe, toilet paper roll holder, soundtrack, and other bonuses was also made available for $219.99.
Plot
It's a snow day at South Park, the most magical of days in a young child's life. Play as The New Kid, as he or she battles Kyle, Kenny, Stan, Cartman, and eventually Mr. Hankey, as they save the town from an oncoming blizzard.
Why It Has No Tegridy
- For starters, it's a massive step back on what made Stick Of Truth and Fractured But Whole so special and amazing.
- Instead of branching out to anime characters, as in the episode, "Good Times With Weapons" along with having combat reminiscent of Mario & Luigi combined with Baldur's Gate 3, or Divinity: Original Sin II, the boys go back to fantasy.
- Wendy is absent for some reason, despite Nichole being there, the former being present as a non-playable character in the Stick Of Truth, and being playable in The Fractured But Whole.
- Also, all of the wild antics The New Kid gets into for Stick of Truth and Fractured But Whole, such as going into Mr. Slave's butthole, having sex with the VIPs, and dodging Spontaneous Bootay are all absent here. The only outrageous antic is the shitstorm Mr. Hankey summons.
- The combat is horrendous and is a huge downgrade from Stick Of Truth and The Fractured But Whole, the previous two games have you rely on some strategy on your attacks, here it's a simple button masher with the same attack animation played over and over. There are no combos, no super moves, no parrying, or anything that will make it a worthwhile action game.
- In fact, you don't feel like you're slashing enemies, but slapping them with a pool noodle, since there is no impact in your attacks, even with the most powerful weapon mostly due to lacking sound effects.
- Poor hit detection makes the combat worse than it is since sometimes you will have a hard time hitting the enemies due to this problem.
- You have an infinite amount of revives, making the game last longer than it is, and this doesn't exactly help to make the game easier.
- Awful level design that is very repetitive, tedious, and overall had fillers to make the levels way longer than they should, and also the level design isn't adapted to the combats that happen in the game.
- Not to mention that in the first part, it constantly changes the level, and while this is an interesting idea, it is executed due to how poorly designed those levels are.
- Not to mention, the levels themselves are also very linear and boring since you just go from one place to another, and, heck, even the hub is incredibly linear, despite having some other things to explore.
- The AI is horrible, constantly getting themselves killed forcing you to revive them, this can make some of the levels a real nightmare because you need to restart all over again if everyone's knocked down.
- Also, when you are knocked down, you need them to revive you but the problem is that a lot of times they will let you die despite clearly seeing that you are going to die, which also makes some levels harder.
- Sometimes they don't even attack the enemies that are right in front of them, and this will make you have to revive them a lot it is this reason why they get killed a lot.
- You cannot get anyone as your allies, make friends, have playable minigames, or even use fart powers. Yes, there is a fart power in this game, but you could swap that out for a mundane power.
- Much like Doraemon on the Famicom and Mega Man on DOS, you can get hit by almost everything, such as the projectiles or even the attacks of the enemies that are almost impossible to dodge, either due to their huge hit detection or because of the poor controls.
- There are only eight weapon types, four for melee and four for ranged. You either get daggers, sickles, a sword and shield, or an axe for melee, and a bow, magic staff, a wand, and a snowball that acts as a grenade for ranged. Likewise, there are only eight powers, one of which is a fart move. THAT'S IT. There are no blunt weapons, no crossbows, and no super moves.
- While bullshit cards (yes, they're called that) make the game slightly more interesting, enemies get bullshit cards too. And even then, all bullshit cards do is pad out the game by making your weapons incredibly weak, giving enemies protection, or increasing the amount of damage they deal.
- There are only five missions, all of which play alike. You just go from one area to another and kill enemies along the way. The only thing that makes it unique is the card mechanic. For comparison, Payday 2 had twelve heists on launch, and Helldivers II had four base missions, but there were thirty-one different objectives in total.
- Not only are there five missions, but they're all also short, lasting about an hour each. The game lasts for 3 to 5 hours, less than half of what Stick of Truth and Fractured but Whole.
- Bland and very paper-thin story that just involves finding out who's behind the blizzard. SPOILERS: It's Mr. Hankey causing the snowstorm because he got canceled on Twitter.
- It might be the worst story out of any South Park media, and this is made even worse by the fact that this game doesn't have that much story.
- Almost all of the humor shockingly falls flat, which is egregious, as South Park is known for its humor.
- Another huge problem with this game is that if you and all of your teammates die in a level, you need to restart all over again since there are no checkpoints in any of the levels. This only makes the game last longer.
- This was also a problem in Ternorman's Revenge, but at least in that game you could have a lot of lives and have fewer chances to get a game over, but here it worse, and is a horrible problem that might make the game an absolute nightmare to beat if you have trouble with it.
- The boss fights are hit or miss since most of them are unbalanced, since they are either way too easy or way too hard, Mr. Hankey is very easy while Kyle and Stan are very hard since their attacks do a ton of damage or they either block your attacks often and even dodge you easily.
- The difficulty is all over the place. Some objectives are ridiculously hard and others are brain-dead easy.
- Customization of The New Kid is also a massive downgrade from Stick of Truth and Fractured but Whole, since there are fewer choices and the choices are extremely limited, similar to Super Bomberman R.
- Overall, because of the lack of players playing this game and a bare minimum of updates, it's safe to call this game dead.
Redeeming Qualities
- The voice acting as usual is amazing with all of the voice actor reprising their roles, even the French version this time had real French voices, and they sound even better than the English voice acting, just like the show.
- The card mechanic is a unique idea, made even better that they can be upgradable along the way.
- The graphics, despite being in 3D, still match the show in terms of movement and certain cutscenes, and they look great even for a 2024 game.
- The graphics are also really colorful as the color palette is well used for this game, and it helps to make the graphics great, especially in environments that look good because of this.
- The character models, despite that being a turn-off for the fans that prefer 2D style in previous South Park games, are still great as always and look detailed, especially the main characters that look just like their animated counterparts and translate extremely well to the 3D, unlike the South Park games by Acclaim from the late '90s.
- Surprisingly for a multiplayer game, there are no microtransactions.
- Some funny moments, such as when Cartman hilariously insults you on the title screen, due to you not starting to play the game, and waiting long for him to insult you, that also pretty unique to do that, since it's the first South Park game to do this.
- The game had potential but was poorly executed due to all the flaws present in the game.
- The beginning and end cutscenes are very faithful to the show and feel like it's a new episode of South Park, it can also make this game feel like an interactive episode of the show due to these, however, most of the cutscenes are in CGI and in-game.
- The in-game cutscenes, while not as good, can still be passable and on some occasions, funny but that doesn't even compare to the RPG games.
Reception
South Park: Snow Day received mixed to negative reviews from critics and audiences, who found it to be a step back from the previous South Park games. IGN gave it a 3/10.
Trivia
- The official website and Steam page for the game initially listed in Japanese as one of the available foreign language audio and subtitles. This was promptly changed with both platforms listing in Japanese for subtitles only.
- Bulrog, Cartman's ninja alter-ego, who appears in his boss fight as a wizard, is named Balrog, in the game files, possibly a typo.
- At first, Wendy was considered a scrapped character, as she had not been found by anyone, but could be found in the game files. That is until a Reddit user made a post where he saw Wendy in the background during the last boss fight with the giant worm.
- However, there are still several audio clips for Wendy found in the game files (in all languages available in the game), indicating that she would likely have a more prominent role.
- This is the only South Park game to have free downloadable content.
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