Carnivores: Ice Age

The Good
As in Carnivores 2, the quality of the artwork and animation in Ice Age is topnotch. The 3D engine still renders both beautiful and convincing scenes, although it is in some ways beginning to show its age (the horizon depth being one such case). The controls are picture-perfect, though, and the design in general exhibits the same sort of simple brilliance that tends to characterize the best games.

The Bad
The sound is less than stellar. It's still good, mind you, but less good than in the previous iteration of the series. The "monsters" are also less frightening this time around, but that is largely due to the fact, I think, that most mammals are inherently less frightening to human beings than enormous lizards with teeth are.

The Bottom Line
Ice Age is a hunting sim. It is not a 3D shooter, nor an "action game." If you don't have the patience for hunting, then you won't like this game. If you do have the patience, and especially if you're already a hunter in real-life, you owe it to yourself to check this one out (or its predecessor, Carnivores 2). Just be careful. This ain't no turkey shoot!

The Good
The graphics are a lot better than the other ones. The animals themselves are cool, my fav being the carnivorous bird. I like how they used the red deer call for the giant deer. I like it second.

The Bad
Even though the graphics are better than the other ones, they're still pretty poor compared to today's games. The animals also have many flaws. They don't attack each other (although they didn't in the other ones). Also the brontotherium, archeopteryx, and diatryma (meat-eating bird) didn't live during the ice age. I also had to download a patch to give it some of the features it was missing on the xp. It also says that the giant deer and bronotherium are harmless, which when I first played found to be wrong. The "secret" animal is VERY annoying!

The Bottom Line
This game is "good." It isn't much different than Carnivores 2, which I thought was better. If you want the best out of this game, then download the patch, otherwise you're missing out on stuff like blood and glare from the sun. I would give it a 3/5.

The Good
Two good things in this game:

• The fact you have to worry about wind, camouflage, hiding and trying to carefully hunt down the animals. It's a pure hunting game!

• The sound helps you to locate your preys, if you are making too much noise, the wind (and it's direction), getting nearer the coast, etc. It's localization is in 3D. However, some of the weapons have realistic sounds, others not (for instance, the bow sounds more like an air gun, but OK, it's a futuristic bow...) The music is acceptable, but non existent in the game itself, as you'll need your ears for hunting.
  
  The Bad
  OK, lots of bad things in this game:

• Get ready for running around the whole scenery hunting down an animal. Unless you try to do it quietly and patiently (I couldn't...), this will be the case with creatures that are afraid of you. For the other case, if it is a ferocious animal, the moment it "feels" you, get ready.. You'll be dead, unless you have a good weapon.

• The creature's AI is very limited. They walk in circles and have simple reactions to the environment. Seems like Doom's AI, they may even block if there isn't a direct path from where they are to their destination (for instance, you, if they're trying to attack you, or far from you, if they're fleeing). It's very sad to see a creature running away from the player, just to arrive to the sea and then walk in random circles in the coast. Very bad for a 2001's game. Another example are the flying birds, which have a strange "flight path", like a spline trajectory. Very unrealistic...

• You begin with a small amount of money, which only allows you to have one weapon: a pistol or a bow, both of them are very weak. If you just want to hunt down the fastest possible, you'll have to use camouflage, the radar and more accessories, which makes the hunting rewards smaller. Consequently you'll have to hunt more just to win the required "money" for acquiring better weapons and accessing the other maps. Again, patience.. too much, in my opinion.

• The graphics are acceptable, but seem somewhat old for a 2001's game. They are extremely polygonal and the engine has problems with distant geometry, i.e., the mountains appear/disappear block by block, suggesting the engine may use a voxel based rendering (or similar). Probably it is the choice the game designers made, to have "blocky" models and scenery but a huge map. However, it doesn't appear that way, because the player only sees a part of the map (the rest is hidden using fog, like in the game Turok), so, the graphics could be much better. However, the game can handle lots of small detail models (like grass), and each one of them is a 3D model.
  
  The Bottom Line
  I approached this game expecting a FPS for hunting virtual animals, but be warned: forget the "FPS". It's a hunting game, played in first person. The only shooting is the one done by you while trying to hit the creatures, who's behavior is very unrealistic... This patiently "hunting" thing doesn't appeal to me much, and very likely to most people out there.