![]() Crash and Eddie are supposed to be annoying, but its supposed to be annoying-funny - comic relief wisecrackers. The new supporting cast seems to have been imported from Far, Far Away. In addition to not looking very appealing, they are used too often to bring "irreverent sass." One thing that made the first ICE AGE so good is that it was trying to be SHREK-like. There are a lot of new creatures in this film. So let's address these annoying characters. Along the way Manny, Sid and Diego get separated from the mass of annoying characters, to end up with three other annoying characters - possums Crash (Sean William Scott, AMERICAN PIE) and Eddie (Josh Peck, MEAN CREEK) and their adopted mammoth sister Ellie (Queen Latifah, CHICAGO), who doggedly refuses to accept that she is indeed a mammoth. It appears that the valley where they all reside is going to flood soon, so they head off to the far end toward a rumored boat. Diego (Denis Leary, TV's RESCUE ME) fears water, which is a real problem when the land of ice you live in is melting all around you. Sid (John Leguizamo, SUMMER OF SAM) gets no respect from the kids in their new larger tribe of various prehistoric animals. Manny (Ray Romano, TV's EVERYONE LOVES RAYMOND) is sad over the possibility that he may be the last mammoth alive. Our loveable trio each has their own separate issues to deal with this time around. Scrat fares much better because he's out on his own. This overshadows poor Manny, Sid and Diego. The new characters in MELTDOWN make the sequel annoying. The characters made the original so wonderful. While that might be a bit disappointing for a big fan of the film, his presence is felt enough through the game that it never feels like he's just been cut out of the equation.Luckily there's a 4-star Scrat short interspersed between the weak sitcom plot of this disappointing sequel to Blue Sky's surprisingly good debut film, ICE AGE. Oddly, Manfred never becomes playable at any point via these minigames. All these games are pretty decent, and fortunately, there's not much repetition or recycling of the same games throughout the adventure. There's also a number of target-shooting and item-collection minigames with Scrat. The game features a series of minigames, including a whack-a-mole (or whack-a-possum, in this case) game starring Diego and a hybrid of a slalom and a rhythm game with Sid. The control is tight, the puzzles are generally clever, and the levels are open-ended and provide a decent bit of exploration.ĭiego and Sid do find their way into the game eventually, although purely in a second-banana capacity. Young children ought not to have too much trouble with the game, but even players from older audiences ought to be able to appreciate much of what the game does, even if it doesn't present an awful lot of difficulty. The jump puzzles featured in Ice Age 2 are fairly run of the mill for the genre, but more challenging and rewarding than your average kid-oriented game. Again, this is a platformer, so it's hardly shocking that the game is something of a collection-fest, but there are thousands of nuts scattered throughout the game. So it's appropriate that you spend the bulk of the game collecting more nuts than you could possibly imagine. The whole hook with Scrat's character is that he's constantly in search of nuts to hoard and bury. Mostly, the game is all about solving various jump puzzles and collecting scads and scads of nuts. Combat in the game is more of a secondary task, since most enemies can't be killed - just knocked out. Like the protagonist in any platformer, Scrat can jump, double jump, and pull off some very basic attacks that mostly involve stomping and swiping with his tail. His twitchy mannerisms and goofy snarls and screeches are pretty cute, and the developers did a great job of giving him moves and abilities that don't seem out of place for a prehistoric rodent. Scrat is an entirely endearing character, and spending the bulk of your time with him is far from a detriment. That turns out for the better in Ice Age 2.
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