Super Snow Fight Review

Super Snow Fight PC Review

At this time of year, my dad used to give me a little bit of advice. “Son,” he’d say, “never eat the yellow snow.”

While there’s nothing big or clever about dad jokes, the above counts as pretty solid advice. But after a couple of hours with Super Snow Fight, you’ll be desperate for anything that offers a little tang. Let me explain:

Super Snow Fight is a top-down, arena-based twin-stick shooter for between one and four players. You – and hopefully some friends – will waggle the left stick to move around, waggle the right stick to aim, and hold down the right trigger to charge and release snowballs. If your snowball hits an opponent, they lose health. When they lose all their health, they die. And when the timer reaches zero, the player with the most kills wins.

If that description sounds a little dry and lacking in excitement, then I’m afraid I have some bad news: that’s pretty much all there is to it.

A Halloween-themed level, because why not.

A Halloween-themed level, because why not.

At the risk of damning the game with faint praise, it’s at least competent. The mechanics are fairly engaging: aiming takes a reasonable amount of skill, producing some real satisfaction when you land a tricky shot on a moving target, and there’s appropriately snowball fight–esque fun to be had from dodging incoming shots.

The only problem is that just like in a real snowball fight, after 20 minutes you’ve had all the fun that’s on offer, your ears are frozen and you want to go home. And the really sad thing is, there’s so much missed potential.

Take the playable characters. There are over 30 colourful characters to unlock by winning matches, in all shapes and sizes – but each one handles and plays in precisely the same way. They move at the same speed, hit with the same strength and even make the same noises. While this certainly makes for a balanced game, it also feels pretty lazy. At the very least, Mario Kart-style ‘light, medium, heavy’ tiers would provide some much-needed variety. Is there any reason why the snowman shouldn’t move a little slower but hit a little harder?

The game’s three unlockable arenas tell a similar story. While the visual variety is welcome, none of them shake things up with an unconventional layout or useful interactive features. Before long, the choice of character and level begins to feel meaningless – because in a way, it is. The scattered power-ups do inject a little welcome chaos into the proceedings, but they’re not really enough to keep the game interesting for more than a little while.

Victory brings but brief respite from the grinding snow-based warfare

Victory brings but brief respite from the grinding snow-based warfare

And that’s disappointing. As mentioned, the moment-to-moment gameplay is often satisfying and engaging – for a while, at least. The asking price isn’t much more than an eggnog latte from an upmarket coffee chain, and if the game had just a little more depth it’d be perfect for an evening’s fun over the Christmas holidays – but as things stand it just doesn’t go the distance.

If you’ve got three or four human players (and enough controllers for each if you’re on a PC – the keyboard really isn’t much of an option here), it might be worth taking for a spin – especially if you’ve got kids around who might not be ready for the all-guns-blazing world of many multiplayer games. Even then, though, I don’t expect it to have much staying power. For two players, I wouldn’t even consider it: you’d be far better off with something designed for a pair, like Nidhogg or Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime.

It’s a real shame, but while it might keep younger players or the bored occupied, most of the time there’s probably a better choice – even if that’s putting your mittens on and heading out to play in the garden.

5 out of 10