Game Review: Save Christmas with Santa (Xbox Series X)

Merry f**king Christmas.

Nothing says it’s the festive period like a cheap, badly made game that markets itself to a younger audience, but delivers gameplay so basic, it’s insulting. Which would be bad enough, except Save Christmas with Santa is also infuriatingly difficult to play, that only the most stubborn and stupid of gamers would even try and complete all twenty of its levels.

Hello…

Yes, I am stubborn and stupid but having reviewed a ton of Christmas releases over the years, finding new ones to play and review is becoming quite a challenge. This is why I put myself through two-odd hours of absolute torture. It’s all for you, dear reader.

It’s Christmas Eve, and all the presents are missing, scattered all over the North Pole for… reasons. Players must step into the surprisingly spy shoes of Saint Nick and recover them all. Can you save Christmas with Santa? Or will the awful platforming of this game have you wishing Krampus could come and take you away!?

It’s the latter, I’m afraid, as Save Christmas with Santa had one job and it’s a job it utterly fails at. It is a 3D platformer, and the platforming is the worst thing about the game. Not only are the controls really floaty, not only does Santa seem to have skates on his boots, but there is no f**king shadow. Which makes all jumping insanely imprecise and you’ll spend more time moving the camera around to ensure difficult jumps can be made. Which they won’t. Expect to fall to your death… a lot.

Thankfully, checkpoints are plentiful, at least until you reach the last level, which challenges to a hair-pulling degree.

All of that is enough to make this a wretched release, but to make matters worse – it’s really bland to look at and has no music. This baffled me, as the Nintendo Switch version has repetitive melody, but unless I switched it off without realising, the only thing I had was sound effects here and there. Not that I missed the music, but it really made the whole thing feel even cheaper.

A game like this reminds you that Christmas is so damn commercial and that most game companies have little interest in anything wholesome or good. They just want money, so will s**t out the most pathetic of games, market it towards kids and claim to be filled with ‘holly jolly goodness’. Harsh? You didn’t force yourself through twenty levels of this rubbish.