You get to once again join Cartman, Stan, Kyle and Kenny and celebrate the most magical day in a young child’s life in South Park, America, a ‘Snow Day’. This is the latest instalment to the South Park games from South Park Digital Studios, who brought us well-known titles like ‘South Park: The Stick of Truth’, ‘South Park: The Fractured but Whole’ and ‘South Park: Phone Destroyer’. The latest title called ‘South Park: Snow Day’ has a massive blizzard taking over the town of South Park and has thrown the entire population into chaos and an old friend is the reason why.

Unlike the previous two games, this is not a turn-based title and is not linked as much as the main characters want to try and reference previous titles. Playing your own individual character, you need to play your role-playing game once again with the boys of South Park, but there is an old friend who has different plans that you need to uncover and defeat. There are a couple of different weapon variations you can use like dual swords, sword and shield and also a double-handed axe.

You can also even use a magic staff or a magic wand to stay true to the imagination of their role-playing universe. The wand was some good fun. I found the double-handed axe to be slow and useless compared to the swords but I’ll leave that up to your personal choice. I would have loved to have seen some more time put into the campaign as it was super short and by the time you get comfortable into the game it’s already over.

The controls seemed somewhat basic and I found myself using the joysticks to move around and spamming “X” to do attacks and also “B” to dive away from the hordes of enemy children. There is a menu option called “Remap Controls” if you weren’t happy with what the developers chose but I think their choice was great and worked well.

It would have been nice for a small lock-on function to be added so you weren’t just swinging and missing all the time and feeling like you were blindly whacking away pop shots.

The movement of the camera was also super janky and felt like it was all over the place even though you could control it. The camera movement needs some serious work in a future update for a more smooth gameplay experience.

Once you have finished a chapter or certain fights you can unlock skill points that can be used in the skill tree. The only one I found that was kinda worth upgrading was the health and even then like the cards it didn’t feel like there was much difference in performance in the gameplay even when upgraded.

It was just an excuse to have to hear Mr Hankey talking a little more and making comments as soon as you unlocked something which most of the time made me chuckle.

The card system used throughout the gameplay seemed to be pointless but is incorporated as a main part of this game. At the end of skirmishes against older or younger snow day kids, you get rewards from ‘Jimmy’ from a choice of 3 in his hand to pick. As you build a deck you can use cards to give you added benefits to go into each fight such as a percentage of more farting damage, enemy infliction, or healing totem etc.

There were different variations of what the cards would do but if they were common or legendary it didn’t seem to make a difference to the overall gameplay. There was one card in the chapters you could use called “BULLSHIT” which gave you something different like laser eyes or growing your character to giant size to punch all the enemies to bits. I would have loved to have seen more variations in the cards and possibly make them feel like they were doing something different depending on the card rarity.

If you played the original two games on the Xbox then completely forgot about how those looked as the developers went for a 3D approach to the characters and environment this time, which I’m still on the fence about. When you grow up seeing something a certain way for it to be changed takes a little bit to get used to. The environment looked stunning being built on Unreal Engine 5 and the developers did not hold back the attention to detail in the environment. When you were running around sometimes it felt like the snow was a little on the heavier side as a fill-in object but as it’s a huge factor in the game it was not super noticeable.

Depending if it was night or day the township of South Park looked fantastic and felt alive. I was not a huge fan of a couple of the character models and felt like the heads on them were slightly rushed compared to their bodies lacking the expressive detail in actions and movement. Even the character you built didn’t feel right and just felt out of proportion. It was interesting seeing the game jump from 3D back to 2D in a couple of the cutscenes and they were done great with seamless transitions. It felt like you were sitting down on the couch and watching another episode of our favourite group of kids.

There are not too many games that can have fart sounds on demand and be so accepted but in true South Park form there are farts but that is the smallest part of the audio in this title. The audio of this game was spot on and felt like I was watching an episode of the TV Show. It was weird that I loved that your character “New Kid” never spoke once but everyone knew what was going on. The fact that the group of fellas would always break the fourth wall of the game, mentioning previous titles and the fact it’s a game was great. If you wanted to find one excuse to play the game the audio would be by far the greatest excuse and is a perfect tribute to animation and cartoon production.

Overall, if you are chasing a game that does not take long but will have you laughing at its crude humour then South Park: Snow Day has been designed for you. While its gameplay at times is a bit questionable like its jokes, ‘It’s time to go to South Park and have a time’!

Written by: Hayden Nelson