South Park: Snow Day is an authentic, but repetitive co-op curse ’em up

There was a time, back in the early days of South Park, when it seemed like the series was destined never to succeed in video game form.

With the licence in the hands of Acclaim, between 1998 and 2000 South Park got an FPS (using the Turok 2 engine), a karting game and a party game, none of which were considered stone-cold classics. A decade later, a pair of Xbox 360 digital exclusives – Let’s Go Tower Defense Play and Tenorman’s Revenge – were fine, but failed to set the world alight.

It wasn’t until Ubisoft stepped forward with its pair of RPGs, The Stick of Truth and The Fractured But Whole, that South Park finally received video game adaptations that not only faithfully replicated the show’s outrageous humour, but crucially were also great fun to play.

Now Cartman and co are back in South Park: Snow Day, but this time Ubisoft isn’t involved. As part of a $900 million development deal with ViacomCBS in 2021 (which includes spin-off movies for Paramount+), creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have made Snow Day in-house through South Park Digital Studios, along with Californian developer Question.

While the initial trailer for Snow Day didn’t exactly get players as excited as Ubisoft’s games did, after playing through the final game, we’re happy enough with it, if not entirely overwhelmed. The switch from Ubisoft’s authentic 2D-like visuals to polygonal characters gave us flashbacks of that 1998 Acclaim FPS, but in reality, there’s no need to worry about that.

The plot is straightforward enough. An enormous snowstorm is causing havoc in South Park, killing many residents and massively inconveniencing others. The kids are happy because it means school’s cancelled, so they head outside to play in the snow.

As in The Stick of Truth, the kids decide to pretend they’re in a fantasy setting, and as one of four ‘New Kids’ – the same gimmick applied in Ubisoft’s previous games to let you create your own avatar – you team up with Cartman to find out who’s behind the snowstorm.

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