Ice Age

The Good
Gameplay is straightforward as the level paths from start to finish. The small number of moves Manny has at his disposal are stomping, trunk walloping, jumping on enemies Super Mario style, flying via skunk spray, Roshan bouncing and shooting big nuts from the trunk. The difficulty of those levels is reasonable for typical gamers. What little graphics that are decent are in the backgrounds, weather effects and foreground objects. Unfortunately this is the limit where Ice Age shows its good side.

The Bad
Graphics and presentation are mostly really bad throughout this cartridge. The stills from the movie are faded like tracing paper put over a snapshot and there's no accompanying text for dialogue or plot, a fatal error to those who have never watched the movie. The worst bit about the graphics are those ugly sprites with their thick bold outlines and blotchy use of colour, that the characters hardly look as they did in CGI. And that awful music ringing in your ears completely eludes the original soundtrack.

The gameplay performs more or less like a poor-man's version of Sonic the Hedgehog mixed with elements of Westwood's Lion King with levels going from left to right in the same linear fashion and bumping into anything hostile taking away your acorns. It's tedious when you need to retrieve the same big nuts over and over to defeat tough enemies, which isn't a clever way to make the levels longer. It gets worse when you play as Sid, because it's hard to make specific jumps over large enemies and the left edge of the screen kills him. If Sid's levels had autorunning, then it would have been okay. And the bosses you fight are a joke. There is no cunning strategy to beat them, just jump on them or shoot big nuts at them.

The Bottom Line
This game did not faithfully emulate the movie, it only took pieces of it to make a quick video game, being released a few days after Ice Age first made it to cinemas. This is just not the movie on the road in a can. It's the same formula of many movie franchises making it to a console or computer and failing to get the same deluxe treatment. When you've seen the game in screenshots, online videos or even on the box art, it's not worth taking a second look, much less playing through all ten levels. Easy to miss this one, so more effort can be put into finding a better game for quality amusement.