Ice Age 2: The Meltdown Video Game Review

"Oh no," I thought. It's a film tie-in. It's a platform game and it features mini-games. Should I drill holes in it? Should I grind it into powder and offer it to the next strong breeze? Should I just stack it with all those free CDs I get with the newspaper and for some reason never throw away? In the end I gave it a chance and fortunately, it's not that bad.

The ice age is coming to an end. The glaciers are melting, which means that soon the valley's going to be flooded. You play the game as Scrat, a saber-toothed squirrel, accompanying the other animals from the film as they try and cross the valley to safety.

The story doesn't play a major part in this game, which is quite welcome. The cut-scenes are short and occasionally funny. They are also quite stylish when the camera pans around a static image in the style of an oil painting while Ray Romano's commentary tells you what's going on. With the opportunity to ransack the film for lengthy sequences, the developers' restraint is quite admirable.

So instead of watching, you're playing, which is how it's supposed to be. What you play is a fairly typical platform game aimed at younger players. You jump, you climb, you swim, you fight. It's all very familiar. When did the double-jump move become standard, incidentally? It doesn't seem to bring a whole lot to a game, yet it's always there. Let's go back to the single jump, but make that further. How does that sound? A bit of speed wouldn't go amiss either. Maybe I'm pining for Sonic, but a lot of these games feel very sedate.

As far as fighting goes, even the attacks are recycled. You have a standard attack, a roll attack, a ground stomp, a spin attack and you can fire pebbles. I didn't use the roll attack or the spin attack at all and conceivably you could complete the game without using any of these.