Review: Ice Age Village (Xbox Live)

Score:
48%

Author: Gameloft

Version Reviewed: 1.1.0.0

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There's a lot of talk about freemium games as one of the new income models for mobile gaming, with a number of successful games across various platforms. But these are outnumbered by games which get the balance all wrong. The majority of these failures are down to the developers becoming greedy and pushing players to buy extra in-game currency as often as possible. Ice Age Village falls into this trap.

You have two currencies in the game, with one being copiously earned during the game (in Ice Age Village, these are the coins), while the more valuable currency (the acorn) is a rarer accquisition. One of the balance points for a freemium game is in the speed of earning the bigger currency - the acorns - and how often they need to be spent in the game to progress. Ice Age Village needs you to spend a lot of acorns to keep playing and does not provide you with nearly enough during regular gameplay.

Unlike the freemium Xbox Live title Bug Village, where you could just about play the game without investing any money, Ice Age Village is going to be a title where an average game player is going to need to get the extra acorns available through the in app purchasing menu. I know that developers and publishers need to earn money, but there is a nice way, and a cheeky way, to do so. Ice Age Village uses the latter way, and it damages the gameplay on offer.

To be honest, there's not a huge amount of gameplay here to make me want to invest the time and the money. I get the feeling that Ice Age Village is aimed towards the younger game player, in the 8-12 age bracket (the sort of gamers who will be big Club Penguin and Moshi Monsters players). The player's job is to build up a village with the sage advice from the main characters in the Ice Age films (Manny, Diego, Ellie, and Sid) appearing in the tutorials. These are very detailed, as you would expect for a game targeted at the younger player. This handholding continues into the main game. You always have a number of tasks that you are working through, and each of these comes with explicit instructions on what to do. Many tasks have multiple ways of achieving them, but I found that unless you followed the instructions perfectly, you were rarely awarded the competition flag on the task.

As well as building up the village, you have mini-games to play that can earn you bonuses. These mini-games are not free to play in the game, you will need to spend the in-game currency, and many of the mini-games will require acorns to play. That makes for a lot of transactions to play some single screen, flash-inspired, games that would struggle to be noticed if they were released individually.

It does feel like Ice Age Village is a game that has been put together in a very hurried way with whatever mini-games were in the developer's toolbox that could be shoe-horned into the Ice Age franchise. That impression isn't diminished when you realise that the app does not use the Fast-App switching code - when you return to the game you'll have the long 'loading...' screen that was meant to have been banned since the earliest days of Windows Phone 8. Either Ice Age Village has been on the shelf for a long time, or there wasn't enough development time allocated for the basics.

Those issues aside, I still come back to the reliance on in-app purchasing. The typical users of the game do not have disposable income, so stand by for pester power on the parents. Ice Age Village feels like a very clinical and direct way for the publishers to extract the maximum amount of money from someone's pocket. That's not what I want in any game, and especially in a game that is superficial, presenting little challenge, and tells you what to press at every opportunity.

I'm going to pass on this one rather quickly, and I'd suggest you do the same.

Reviewed by Ewan Spence at 16:25 UTC, May 8th 2013