Ice Age 2 - The Meltdown

Somebody at Eurocom looked at the Ice Age films and made the only sensible casting decision available: give the game to the squirrel. Scrat is the series' pure slapstick engine, a wordless creature whose entire personality is wanting an acorn and being punished for it, and that translates into platforming logic far better than a wisecracking mammoth would. Acorns are the collectible. Gravity, ice and animal teeth are the obstacles. The joke and the loop are the same thing, which is more design coherence than most licensed tie-ins of 2006 managed.

The levels themselves are conventional in the way family platformers of the sixth generation almost always were. You run and jump through melting caves, flooded valleys and log-strewn water, climbing, gliding on ice and swatting at creatures that stand between Scrat and his nut. The camera is mostly obedient, the checkpointing is forgiving, and nothing asks for precision the target audience could not manage. It has the feel of a game tuned so that a child does not get stuck, which is a legitimate goal and also a ceiling on how interesting the moment-to-moment play can be.

What keeps it watchable is the animation. Eurocom did solid work reading Blue Sky's character models onto PS2 hardware, and Scrat's flailing, his frozen-stiff panic and his desperate lunges survive the translation better than the environments do. The film's colour palette is white-on-white by nature, and a console of this vintage does not have much room to make ice look like anything other than flat blue-grey. Some stretches are genuinely drab.

The wider release also carried side diversions built for a second player to join in, which was standard practice for a movie game released across every platform in the building. They are short and they are not where the game's attention went. The main run is the point.

Judged against the licensed pile of its year, this sits in the upper half, mostly because it picked a good protagonist and did not try to do too much with him. It is not a game anyone needs to revisit for its mechanics. It is a game that understood a small, funny character and built something modest and competent around him, which in the tie-in economy of 2006 counted as care.