Ice Age: Scrat’s Nutty Adventure (PS4)

Back in 2002, 3D animation company Blue Sky Studios kicked off with a film called Ice Age about funny talking prehistoric mammals. In that film a little saber-toothed squirrel would appear at parts and, in his efforts to find and store acorns for later, would end up in a range of silly little slapstick situations. Becoming the company’s mascot with his simple but fun antics, Scrat would reappear in future Ice Age films and even star in increasingly absurd independent shorts where his simple hope of holding onto his acorn would lead to things as wild as even being sent off into space. Considering how far he had already gone for the sake of a nut, building a whole game around his continued efforts isn’t too far a stretch, and that trip to space would even help to add a bit more to what shape the game could take.

 

While Scrat doesn’t head to the stars in this particular adventure, the saber-toothed squirrel’s latest efforts to acquire more nuts lead to him uncovering the relics of an alien civilization on Earth, the Scratazons building structures throughout the world that allow for the game to break away from its natural environments when it wants to make its 3D platforming more involved. Scrat ends up roped into helping the absent Scratazons recover the Crystal Nuts that seem to help power their alien technology, and since those nuts just so happen to look like acorns, it doesn’t take much to convince the nervous little critter to go after them. From there Scrat heads out to four different areas of his Ice Age world, the early stages in these locations rather simple mixes of snowy mountains, icy waters, and cold caves, but the Scratazon tech adds in more unnatural platforms so you aren’t just walking across areas that attempt to look somewhat realistic. Near the end though things get a little more special, the game having areas closer to ancient ruins as well as a lost world with dinosaurs and a lava-heavy volcanic region.

 

Scrat really isn’t built to be a hero though, both in his range of skills and how they end up seeing use. On your adventure you’ll encounter little clusters of enemies like large beetles and crabs that Scrat can fight. While in his movie appearances the little prehistoric creature used some Kung Fu moves to comedic effect, the attempt to translate these into a video game fighting method comes up short. When he strikes the dramatic martial arts poses with his kicks, it actually moves his body in an unusual way, making attacking something directly in front of you a little less straightforward than it should be. Actually hitting with each blow of your simple ground combo ends up requiring a little finagling, but thankfully the small enemies you face pose so little a threat that you really don’t need to stop and fight them often. You do have an aerial tail twirl better for hitting foes but using it while low to the ground might lead to it ending when you land and before you’ve hit a foe, but a butt slam can instead trivialize such battles as it can send a little shockwave to all foes near you and stun them long enough for a second slam. The slow ground pounding method is efficient but mostly it is just a way of clearing out foes that are never interesting or engaging to fight, and since only a few of these basic enemies are even necessary to fight in order to cleanly make progress, the appearance of them ends up robbed of any potential excitement or danger.

There are a few threats you will need to look out for still, mainly if it is something like a flying beetle that can spit gunk at you from afar. You can hurl snowballs at them from afar to make taking them down fairly easy if you can’t reach high enough for a tail twirl, but they are still a mild concern at best. What is likely meant to be a greater threat are the sleeping wolves and carnivorous Guanlong dinosaurs. These two creatures can instantly kill Scrat, and while a death incurs no penalty and rarely sets you back far, they could have at least been potentially dangerous if they weren’t so slow and simple-minded. You are meant to crouch down and sneak past these creatures as they slumber, but simply running past is usually fast enough and unless there’s something more involved than passing through to do in the area they have little chance of catching you. Of all the regular enemies the piranhas that pop up between jumps over open water end up perhaps the most truly dangerous to Scrat even though overcoming them is often just a simple matter of timing, but it shows how little the regular foes really contribute to the platforming adventure’s difficulty or danger.

 

Bosses on the other hand are actually pretty competently designed albeit few in number. The Pteradon for example actually requires you to use a dodge roll to avoid his attacks and identify which ability he is about to use to avoid it properly later in the fight. It’s not too complex, but it is a bit of a challenge with some risk of real damage if you don’t respond properly, and other fights like avoiding the quick snapping teeth of a pair of hungry aquatic carnivores that tip the ice you stand on actually provide some dangerous battles that require a touch of skill to avoid being harmed.

 

The boss battles are probably the most interesting part of the adventure unfortunately, the regular platforming as you move forward through the stages very bland and rarely creative. The game gets the idea in its head that slow moving platforms are a good design choice which leads to a fair bit of waiting for jumps that aren’t hard to complete and climbing walls or using wall jumps in prescribed areas is also never really much more than a means of getting to a higher location challenge-free. The game does eventually start coming up with ideas that ask for a little more involvement like finding the right symbols in an area to hit with your snowballs to open a door and there are power cores sometimes hidden about that you need to carry to the right mechanism to activate it, sometimes even swapping them around or removing them with the right timing to line things up. They are still fairly simple activities but they can at least break up the monotony of very basic jumping that the weak fights fail to break up, but Ice Age: Scrat’s Nutty Adventure really does feel like it has few ideas on how to vary its platforming up and thus you’ll be doing very similar simple jumping challenges all throughout the adventure that quickly become rote.

To make navigating a level a bit more interesting there are collectibles and hidden treasures to uncover. Purple Shards are scattered all throughout stages, and once you’ve collected enough of them you will automatically upgrade Scrat’s health bar. Basic enemies can drop these so if you are concerned about collecting them you can stay and fight those boring beetles, but there are so many shards out in the open and many contained in crates off to the side of the main path that you can easily get all of the possible health upgrades before you’ve even entered the back half of the game. Having a good amount of health only really impacts the boss battles anyway as rarely are regular battles so dangerous, the sleeping carnivores are instant kills, and even dropping into frigid water or onto lava gives you a few free bounces before it kills you and resets you to one of the generously placed checkpoints.

 

While the main path of Ice Age: Scrat’s Nutty Adventure is often bland and lacking in ideas, sometimes you might spot a space off to the side that you feel you might just barely be able to jump to with creative use of some level geometry. Sometimes the prize is an underwhelming cluster of shard boxes, but other times you might find one of the rare collectible statues that look like creatures and characters from the Ice Age films, and other times things do require a bit more platforming acumen if you want to reach one of the tablet pieces used to create murals of scenes from Scrat’s current adventure. This could have almost added a deeper layer to players searching for a greater challenge, but there are a few barriers in the way of this extra angle. Sometimes you might see a suspicious outcropping and hop over thinking a statue is hiding over there only to hit an invisible wall or learn that a surface that should be solid instead sends you falling into the void. If the game didn’t sometimes use these same areas for hiding collectibles you’d just learn not to be adventurous in such a way, but the game arbitrarily picks some hard to reach places to have solid ground while other nooks and crannies are completely inaccessible. What makes trying to engage with this other side of the experience even worse is how often you’ll find a special area only to learn you need one of the moves you acquire later in the game to grab the collectible. While getting new moves like a double jump and even the ability to telekinetically move blocks around does add a tiny bit to later platforming, these early stages essentially just put things out of reach so you need to return later and use the ability to grab tablets and statues without any real thought besides knowing the required button presses. While you can see the ending regardless of how many items you collected, if you want to grab these extra goodies you will have to replay almost every level since you won’t have the skills necessary for completion until late in the adventure.

 

Almost as a bit of a breather though, most of the major areas end with some new form of Scrat chasing after the freshly found Crystal Nut. Skydiving, surfing, and riding down a giant ice slide all inject a brief bit of different play where you need to dodge barriers up ahead and can grab shards if you so wish, these segments not difficult either but breaking up the constant plain platforming with something more energetic and conceptually fresh. Like with the bosses if the game had more of these things might have maintained some degree of interest since they at least try to provide something new each time, but unfortunately most of your adventure barely breaks away from a bland mold established in the earliest stages.

THE VERDICT: You might get a decent boss battle or action minigame near the end of the major areas of Ice Age: Scrat’s Nutty Adventure, but the platforming and small fights along the way are either lacking in creativity or barely even challenges and the small evolutions they do undergo barely shake up how you play. Scrat’s basic attacks are unwieldy to use but the foes he usually faces don’t even really require you to fight them, even the supposedly dangerous one hit kill wolves and dinosaurs easy to run right past. Platforming mostly just asks you to wait on moving platforms save for some occasional cases of shuffling power cores about, and even as you get new abilities the game design still settles into trials that don’t really ask much thought or skill to overcome. The optional collectibles almost encouraged the player to do some more difficult exploration, but just as often what looks like a hidden area has an invisible wall or no floor at all, and gating so much of it with later acquired abilities being required just makes exploring often feel fruitless as well.

 

And so, I give Ice Age: Scrat’s Nutty Adventure for PlayStation 4…

A BAD rating. If jumping around the levels was going to be the heart of the majority of its experience, Ice Age: Scrat’s Nutty Adventure needed to invest a lot more creativity into how that act unfolds. The power core idea had potential but rarely goes beyond opening a door or setting certain moving platforms into motion, and the game too often mistakes placing some easily ignored enemies in your path as a sufficient challenge after a period of easily hopping about spaces that didn’t take much thought or ability to navigate. There does seem to be a little understanding of what can make traversal difficult as some statues and tablet pieces are hidden in spaces that take some effort to reach, but the game discourages such curiosity with how often it places down a barrier that requires a power from later in the adventure to overcome. Already clearing a normal level is unexciting due to unambitious and repetitive layout concepts, but asking the player to play nearly every stage again if they want to engage with this second side of the game feels like it squanders something that could have helpfully broken up the monotony of that first run. The boss fights aren’t complex but have enough considerations to them that they have a chance of actually challenging the player and those segments where you directly chase after the Crystal Nut inject something lively and new into an experience that stagnated surprisingly close to its start. However a greater overall variety would be necessary to salvage this experience and instead the game trots out basic ideas that barely evolve on what has been seen countless times elsewhere in this short adventure.

 

Part of the humor of Scrat is the little nervous rodent ends up in situations well beyond his capabilities but his desire to grab his acorn leads to him pressing on anyway, sometimes getting roughed up for it or deeply in over his head. If the kind of creative scenarios he finds himself in during the Ice Age films or independent shorts were translated into an energetic ongoing adventure, the player could enjoy trying to overcome some situations, and things like the Pteradon fight do briefly capture that feeling. Instead though Scrat still feels like a poor fit for an action platformer but the world itself so weakly designed that doesn’t matter. He may scream when you wake up a Guanlong but an actual dinosaur can sometimes barely seem a threat with how tame most dangers are, and since navigating the world rarely gets more challenging, Ice Age: Scrat’s Nutty Adventure feels more like the boring moments of travel the saber-toothed squirrel theoretically engaged with before he arrived at the kind of over-the-top slapstick situations that made him an endearing mascot.