[Review] Ice Age Scrat's Nutty Adventure

[Bandolero -]

The last Ice Age film or short came out back in 2016. There has been the talk of a new film or TV series, but nothing has actually released in the last 3 years. Until late last week. For some reason the world received a new Ice Age video game, starring Scrat. It’s weird that three years after the last film we get a new game. What’s even weirder is that this game isn’t bad. I’d even say, I like it. Seriously.

Ice Age: Scrat’s Nutty Adventure was released for PS4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC on October 18th. It stars Scrat, that weird and overly hyper squirrel (?) who is always looking for a nut. At the start of the Scrat finds ruins of a technologically advanced ancient squirrel civilization. To unlock the secrets of the ruins and become powerful, Scrat needs to track down three super nuts. This is all real. I’m not making any of this up. Honestly, it isn’t that weird considering the last Ice Age film had a plot that was entirely put into motion by Scrat poorly operating a UFO.

The thing is, this game and its wild story reminded me of a lot of those licensed games we use to get back in the PS2-era of gaming. And it’s odd to feel this way, but I think I miss those games? Sure licensed games still exist, but they’ve all mostly moved to mobile platforms. Which is sad. Sure many of these licensed games were bad, but not all of them. And as a kid, it was so cool to play a game on my TV based on a cartoon or movie I loved. Scrat’s Nutty Adventure feels like one of those games like it was frozen back in 2003 before it was published and only now, in 2019, has it been thawed out and released.

There are some annoying issues in Scrat’s Nutty Adventure, for sure. The camera can bug out in places, animations don’t always look great and combat isn’t fun at all. But damn it, I still enjoyed it. I sat down to only play it for an hour, just to grab some screenshots and get a feel for it. But I ended up playing it for nearly 3 hours.

It’s weird to have a nostalgic reaction to something brand new. I don’t even like the Ice Age films or have any strong feelings about the franchise. But playing a colorful and simple licensed platformer did activate some part of my brain and made me happy.

It is very VERY easy to look at screenshots of this game or the trailer and dismiss it or make fun of it. And again, there are some problems and issues with it.