Ice Age 2: Arctic Slide

Our cuddly, loveable prehistoric heroes are back again for the pleasure of Ice Age 2 – Arctic Slide.

In this game, Scrat (the rather unfortunate nut loving squirrel) is on a mission to collect as many acorns as possible throughout the right to left scrolling slippery platform style game. Your controls are simple – up (to jump), right (to run), left (to brake) and do nothing to slide around and let Scrat zip along the icy surfaces. Along the way you can explore arctic landscapes and cavernous underground caves on your way.

Manny the mammoth will tell you the objective of every level (basically how many nuts you have to collect). As you slip and slide along your merry little way, you must use a combination of judgement and guesswork to decide when to jump, slow down and speed up to help you recover the acorns you come across.

As this is a game targeted for the younger audiences out there, it’s a very light-hearted affair. You have three lives and you will be only in peril if you get struck by giant snowballs, falling icicles, avalanches or should you fall down a crevasse. Having said that, you’re not too likely to encounter any of these dangers for the first few levels, and they only increase in frequency once you’ve got used to the controls.

As you can probably guess, every level you complete (by gathering the target number of acorns) you will progress to the next level where you’ll start off pretty much where you finished in more of the same antics.

For me, as a neutral fan of the films and game, I found the repetition of this game a little disappointing and would have thought some mini-games or power-ups which could have been introduced to the mix to add more variety and challenges along the way were left out to the detriment of the overall appeal.

However, on the plus side, the graphics were needless to say very cute and the game soon grew in terms of challenges and difficulty. Armed with only simple but effective controls to match with my own reactions and skill – I found that this game got pretty addictive and did achieve what all good games should – a smile on my face!

Overall then, I’d say that if you enjoy simple challenges and like retro style platform games then this is certainly worth a closer look. You will be rewarded and challenged by this title and find yourself pretty glued to the screen trying to get your cuddly Scrat from the start to the finish. In essence this is a nutty challenge that you’ll struggle to put down once you’ve picked it up.

Rating 82%

Positives

Very addictive

Good graphics

Good Music

Responsive and simple controls

Negatives

Very Repetitive

A little too easy

When hit by an object, Scrat can’t move to try and avoid being hit more