South Park: Snow Day! (Nintendo Switch) – The test

In 2014, The Stick of Truth was released, a turn-based rpg, and in 2017 we could put our little faces on the Annal of Destiny, an rpg this time with a touch of tactics. And now we have the latest Snow Day, released recently, which completely changes the situation by always putting us in the shoes of a new player, but this time in a multiplayer action game. So prepare your best cards, your best +10 bonus to all damage and let's go for South Park: Snow Day!

We deliberately delayed the release of this test so that we could try everything: Un free DLC mode which was available when the game was released as well as the FR voices, to which wewe didn't have accessduring the phase reserved for testers, as well as the servers which were far too empty.

So cool, it’s snowing!

As in previous games, a problem arises in the small town of South Park. In Snow Day as the name suggests, it is a snow day, and a snow storm to be precise is hitting the city. There are already a few deaths, people are completely frozen, everyone is on edge and fighting to get the last rolls of toilet paper. In short, you will have understood, we are still in a satire of our reality.

Cartman is so happy because thanks to the snow, the schools are closed and it's the best day in the world for him! However he is still in his role play with Stan, Kyle, Kenny, Butters and you the new one! You will be able to create your character with the South Park character editor. As usual it works quite well and later you will be able to unlock more outfits to personalize your character a little more.

The story will first focus on Cartman who seeks to defeat Kyle, then on Stan in their life-size role-playing game, then a twist arrives, and we will finally seek to stop the snowstorm, much to the dismay of Cartman who doesn't want to go back to school.

It's not cool

On the gameplay side, how can we turn this around without saying that it's more than disappointing: if from the outset we are won over by the humor and the South Parkian atmosphere, apart from that it's really too little work .

Overall we are in a rather classic action game, one button for weak hits, one button for strong hits, no combos in mode 2 weak hits then one strong, no just a sequence if you press 3x on the weak hit . You have one button left to use your ranged weapon, then 2 triggers for special attacks. To fight, you will have 3 different weapons, the double knives which allow you to poison, the sword + shield which allows you to protect yourself and the two-handed ax which allows you to do great damage. Each of these weapons will have a charged attack. The same goes for ranged weapons, 3 are at your disposal, a bow, a stick which shoots a fireball and a wand which acts as a flame thrower.

Needless to say, it's not crazy in terms of choice. No role like DPS, Tank or Support, here it's primary. Plus once in the game it's not better, the camera is a little crazy, but it can be okay. The concern, clearly, is the lack of overall content. 5 chapters, therefore 5 levels, which are very similar, and yes because everything is white. So we sometimes have small hillocks, but it's not crazy. We're exaggerating a little, because each level has a slightly different style, but it's still snow in the end and it quickly becomes very white. Additionally on Switch we are spoiled by very advanced aliasing.

Once we get into the thick of combat, we have a lot of collision issues, we have zero hitting sensation, it's just ultra basic, not very well done and really feels like we're coming back in the 64/GC era and it's disappointing. We have a little feeling when we choose our cards, at the start of the game when we can choose our ultimate power, always very fun: fart to make the opponents vomit, become giant, make meteorites fall, and the opponent will also have bonuses like transforming our weapons into pool fries or even having lightsabers. During the game, we will be able to obtain cards that will improve our powers/techniques, such as increasing the radius of action of our healing flag, or on the contrary making it inflict damage on nearby enemies.

It's nice, but it's light, because the rest of the game is rather weak to play and not really fun. So to return to the duration we are on 5 chapters, with a little less than 1 hour per chapter. The lifespan of the game is therefore around 4 hours in a straight line, then you can repeat the chapters in a loop to obtain dark matter to increase a skill tree which increases your damage or your HP for example.

A DLC is present and freely available, which adds 4 maps consisting of having to survive waves of enemies to also obtain dark matter (poop in reality…).

It sucks!

In terms of atmosphere, we are in pure South Park, which is what increases the interest of the game a little. We waited to release the test, because we had been told the official French voices and suffice to say that we do not we're not disappointed: having been bottle-fed in South Park, hearing these voices makes us love it, and since it speaks quite a bit during combat it's rather great to understand while we're busy playing. However, if the audio VF is successful, it is completely unsuccessful in terms of lip synchronization. Often it's even completely delayed by several seconds and it's horrible. Visually, we will be a little disappointed by the generic 3D aspect of the game, a cel shadding would have been more appreciated or at least something close to this 2D paper cartoon aspect of South Park.

We find some familiar characters from the series, but it's so little compared to the previous games… This is perhaps what is most shocking about this Snow Day, the previous ones were real love letters to South Park , here we still have a little more of the impression that we are exploiting the license and that the game is being thrown in our faces. If it weren't for the original dubbing, one might even wonder if it wasn't a work done by amateurs.

On the network side, there too we wanted to wait until there were a few people and suffice to say that it lags, it's not fluid, it's even more complicated than solo. So several answers are possible: bad portability? Foam Switch server? We'll never know, but it's not very pleasant. When we are solo, we have AIs that arrive (and also leave, because they go back and forth in the game), as soon as a real person joins us then there is no more AI and we must therefore finish at 2… Same, bug or not, we'll never know… The AIs are generally quite stupid, sometimes they just don't do anything, however they make you revive each time and that's cool. As for the enemy AI, they generally do anything as well and worse, it is so scripted that often the ranged units that have been moved from their spawn points will just try to return to their locations leaving you with the massacre.

South Park: Snow Day! is available on theeShop like in physics at the price of thirty euros.



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