No More Snow is a twin-stick shooter set in “a far away realm […] hidden in the darkness of an ancient forest.” The humans living there have bloated, low-poly heads scarred with jagged, rictus smiles, but despite their monstrous appearances, they seem genuinely happy—until they are attacked by a horde of evil snowmen and their generals, all led by the Christmas demon, Krampus. The only ones who can repel the snowman army and its leaders are Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus, who equip themselves with firearms to clear the horde and deliver a merry Christmas to the far away realm.
No More Snow plays like a typical twin-stick shooter. These videogames are built around power fantasies. The player character is typically outnumbered by hyper-aggressive enemies, often in magnitudes of dozens to one. They make up for this disadvantage with phenomenal firepower that lets them effortlessly slaughter the enemy hordes. Their power is counterbalanced by their fragility. Twin-stick shooter player characters typically die in one hit; in No More Snow, they can take three. With one hand, I control the player character’s movement, guiding them away from monster packs. With the other, I control their aim, directing their weaponfire towards the most dangerous enemies on screen. This design emphasizes deliberate movement, careful aim, and do-or-die decision making, as a single mistake will let an enemy draw close enough to the player character to deal a fatal blow.
The player character in this twin-stick shooter is the spirit of giving and icon of the secular Christmas celebration, Santa Claus. In local co-op play, my partner may join me as his wife, Mrs. Claus. Both player characters have only cosmetic differences. Each is equipped with a broad axe they can wield in melee combat. Its arc is wide and powerful, killing most basic enemies in a single swing, but is also slow. If the player character is caught using their axe against a large group, they will be quickly overwhelmed. The player characters also carry bombs capable of devastating large groups of enemies. Their explosives supply is infinite, reined in only by a short four-second cooldown. There is little reason not to hurl a bomb at the nearest enemy cluster whenever the cooldown resets.
While useful and durable, the player characters’ axe and bombs are ultimately secondary weapons. Their firearm is their primary tool for cutting down the armies of snowmen and other fantasy creatures that charge towards them. By default, each is equipped with a peashooter. This weapon is weak, taking multiple shots to kill even the most basic enemy, and slow to fire. It is a terrible weapon for a twin-stick shooting protagonist. Thankfully, they rarely have to use it. New firearms are plentiful, appearing in gift boxes wrapped with brightly colored bows at the start of every level and near every checkpoint.
The available guns do not stretch the imagination. Most checkpoints host two gift boxes, one containing a two-barrelled shotgun and the other a Thompson submachine gun, complete with iconic round ammo drum. This addition is decorative; every weapon in No More Snow has bottomless ammunition reserves and never needs to be reloaded.
Both of these firearms are well balanced. The shotgun is slower to fire and inaccurate beyond short range but makes up for these shortcomings with terrific stopping power. The submachine gun lacks the shotgun’s brutality but offsets that with an above-average firing rate and greater accuracy at a distance. When an enemy group is far away, I wish my player character was holding a submachine gun. As the group gets closer, the shotgun feels like the wiser choice. Neither firearm obviously outclasses the other.
New firearms become available late in many levels, including upgrades for the shotgun and submachine gun that multiply their firing rate. Also available are rocket launchers and flamethrowers. These invert the balance of the standard weapon pair. The rocket launcher is slow to fire and has devastating power with great long-range accuracy, while the flamethrower has the shortest range of all weapons but makes up for it with a continuous stream of fire that obliterates enemy packs and melts boss’ hit point meters. I can recognize the thought and care put into each weapon’s design. All of them feel more useful in specific situations and none feel useless in every situation. The player characters can only equip one at a time, but the balance means I can choose based on preference instead of situation.
Every level begins at the far left of a region and ends at its far right. With no variation of any kind, the player characters trudge across these levels in a straight line. Combining this kind of uncomplicated level design with twin-stick shooting is No More Snow’s greatest mistake.
Twin-stick shooters require wide open areas to be interesting or challenging. Open areas create the space for enemies to appear from any angle and potentially surround or corner the player character. With No More Snow’s rigid, corridor-shaped design, levels only allow enemies to appear directly in front of and behind the player characters. Nearly every level thus unfolds in the same way: Run forward until the next enemy group spawns, then move backwards while holding down the fire button until the group is defeated. Repeat until the level, and then the entire videogame, is completed. In the infrequent situations where enemies also appear from the back of a level, they spawn in a small group that is easily eliminated, clearing a safe path for the player character to resume slowly inching backwards while firing at the main enemy group.
The predictability of enemy spawn points is worsened by their rudimentary AI. Once an enemy becomes aware of a player character’s presence, they move toward their target in a straight line. If any obstacle gets in their way, they will walk endlessly into the obstruction. This behavior can be exploited in a few places to trap large numbers of enemies in a tight space where they may be vaporized with a well-aimed bomb. A few enemies do subvert this behavior, notably stationary snowmen archers who snipe at the player characters from across the screen with burning arrows, but these enemies appear in only a few situational areas.
While basic level structure is formulaic and undermines the twin-stick shooting design, individual levels still feature some unique elements that make them stand out. One level takes place on a set of parallel train tracks, with the player characters running between the rooftops of high-speed trains when they pass near each other. Another places the player characters on a frozen river they must cross using floating ice slabs and waterlogged shipping crates. These levels are the exceptions and not the rule. Most are straightforward corridors differentiated only by their decorative elements, like a graveyard, a village, and a factory floor. They all blend together.
No More Snow’s bosses are notably more impressive in their design ambition than the levels and standard enemies. All of these bosses are consciously Christmas-themed and do not attempt to push beyond that boundary. Monstrous reimaginings of a snowman king, a nutcracker, an elf, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and more command the snowman army, not to mention the inclusion of Krampus as their overall leader. The only slightly unexpected boss is a pumpkin-headed reaper, a Nightmare Before Christmas-esque representation of the macabre Halloween season transitioning into the jolly Christmas holidays.
Where the bosses impress, especially in contrast to the braindead behavior of their minions, is in their fight mechanics. Each is built to exploit the player characters’ fundamental weakness: Their movement speed plummets while they are firing their weapon and takes a moment to return to normal after releasing the trigger.
Different bosses exploit the player characters’ slowed movement in different ways. The Nutcracker, imagined here as an unstoppable automaton, trudges towards the player characters and slowly raises its weapon before swinging it in a blinding flash. The head elf stomps on the ground, filling the battlefield with the shadows of rubble that will soon fall on the player characters’ heads. Krampus alternates between charging with his horns and filling the screen with waves of fire. It’s not enough to move the player characters away from these attacks. I must anticipate them, know when to release the trigger, and when it is safe to resume firing. In many cases, if the player characters have not already stopped firing their weapon and reclaimed their full movement speed when a boss’ attack begins, they are guaranteed to be hit. These fights are interesting, challenging, and most importantly, fair. They are the best thing in No More Snow.
If I could choose one aspect of No More Snow to be embellished, it would be for the bosses, environments, and overall conflict to have greater characterization. A brief narrated introduction is the only voice I hear while playing; even the grunts and cries I expect to hear from a violent videogame are eerily absent. This narration is light on details, revealing only that Krampus and his generals are attacking the humans of the far away realm. Krampus’ traditional motivation of punishing the naughty goes unmentioned. He wears a hooded version of Santa’s familiar red coat and trousers, suggesting he seeks to replace the toymaker as the holiday’s figurehead. Attacking humans is counterproductive to that goal, so this guess seems unlikely.
Other details are vague in more interesting ways. Other than the snowmen, the most prominent soldiers serving in Krampus’ army are diminutive elves with long, floppy ears. They are especially prominent in a level filled with conveyor belts carrying wrapped presents. The implication seems to be that, quite apart from the happy workforce of the traditional Santa Claus myth, these elves are unhappy slaves rebelling against their cruel master—who responds to their rebellion with indiscriminate gunfire. That they explode into a shower of candy upon their death does little to make me feel better about their fate.
Many levels are soundtracked by originally composed music. Others use familiar, public domain tunes reimagined as somber, downtempo dirges played on a piano or glockenspiel. These songs add some clever subtext to the levels they accompany. During Santa’s assault on the toy factory filled with his rebelling elves, “In The Hall of the Mountain King” plays, a song that originally partnered with Peer Gynt’s visit to a fortress filled with trolls, gnomes, and goblins. My favorite arrangement plays during Santa’s final assault on Krampus Village. It reinterprets an instrumental version of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” as a sinister threat to his enemies; Krampus’ base is all that remains of the Christmas demon’s forces, and the jolly old elf is coming to wipe them out once and for all.
No More Snow is a straightforward videogame that offers nothing beyond its original premise. There are no collectables to scour each level for. There are no challenges that encourage replaying levels under special conditions. Once I’ve seen the player characters through each level, defeated the snowman army, their leaders, and Krampus, I’ve seen everything it has to offer. Only ascending difficulty levels with the parodic names Wonderful Life, Dying Hard, and Christmas Nightmare offer some variation to a second or third playthrough.
This lack of replayability is made up for by additional campaigns. When I first begin playing, I am prompted to select which campaign I wish to play. The original scenario against Krampus’ attack on the far away realm is given the unimaginative name of “Main Campaign.” There are slots beside Main Campaign available for three additional campaigns, though at the time of this writing, only one is filled by a scenario called During Summer.
During Summer follows Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus on a sunny vacation in an island paradise following the bloodshed of their previous Christmas. The new setting dresses them in retro swimsuits and allows them to swap their axes for cutlasses. Despite these graphical embellishments and the new setting, the conflict is once more against Krampus and his snowmen army. The levels, at least, are quite different, with all new obstacles, mechanics, and bosses. Though Krampus once again capstones this second story, he has new abilities and attacks more aggressively, making for a much more challenging fight than his Main Campaign appearance.
No More Snow is an adequate twin-stick shooter. While mechanically sound, its level design fails to create good environments for twin-stick shooting. Main Campaign and During Summer may each be finished in about one hour; when and if the third and fourth campaigns ever materialize, I presume they will be about the same length. One hour per campaign is No More Snow’s sweet spot. It’s just long enough to feel satisfactory, but not so long that I become bored by the repetitive levels that squander the strengths of twin-stick shooting. Christmas is a strangely underserved theme in videogames, especially in comparison to film, television, and music. If you’re looking for a Christmas videogame to play in the upcoming season, you could do worse than No More Snow. I only wish I could say you could also do better. It’s serviceable, but if you play it on Christmas Eve, you’ll have forgotten it by New Year’s.