Ice Age Village Review: Build a happy home on Windows Phone

Windows Phone 8 got its outset proper taste of Xbox-enabled freemium games when Gameloft's Existent Soccer 2022 debuted earlier this year. But that game reached for players' wallets and then deeply and so oftentimes that we could barely enjoy it. Now Gameloft gives us some other freemium game, the social urban center builder Ice Age Village. Don't let Real Soccer 2022 or Glu Mobile'due south Bug Village sour your feelings toward this 1; it is less buggy than its genre predecessor and fifty-fifty players who choose not to spend any existent currency tin can take a good time.

License to build

Believe it or not, Ice Age Hamlet actually marries the content of the Water ice Age movies with the urban center edifice game genre in a fairly organic way. See, 2022'due south flick involved everyone'south favorite supercontinent Pangaea breaking up as it had been exposed to Kryptonite, and presumably a bunch of malformed CG animals migrating as a consequence.

That's largely the story of the game, told in cut scenes through still pictures and fairly well-written text. The animals of prehistory take lost their homes due to continental drift, and the protagonists of the serial, Manny and Sid decide to form a village in order to firm them all. Every time the thespian unlocks a new species to house within the village, that's some other critter making its fashion to the new safe haven. Heck, even the genre's staple premium currency of acorns is organic to the movie series. Well done, game and film makers.

Reap what y'all sow

Every bit with any game of this blazon, Ice Age Village gives players two master objectives: the acquisition of resources and increasing experience levels in order to unlock new content. Three kinds of structures contribute to those ends when placed throughout the village. Annotation that many unlock and go bachelor for purchase with coins based on the village'southward level, while others can be purchased at whatever fourth dimension with acorns.

Animals

The most important resource producers in the game, animals dole out both coins and experience. They come in all shapes and classes, including mammals, fish, birds, and dinosaurs. Placing a new animal within your village gets the resources train rolling, but in order to maximize output you'll want to acquire a whole family of that creature: 2 adults and two offspring. Each new family member costs the same as the initial family member – think of calculation to a family every bit leveling up the unit of measurement.

Every bit an added wrinkle, all children (fifty-fifty hairy mammals) commencement out every bit eggs. These take varying amounts of real time to hatch, from half an hour to four days. Once the egg hatches, its man owner has twice the full convenance fourth dimension to pick it upwardly – so a 30 minute egg would demand to be picked up within one 60 minutes after completion. Have longer than that and you'll have to pay i acorn to recover the baby. Thankfully the game signals egg readiness with toast notifications.

Fun stuff

These structures include recreational buildings like swings, slides, ice skating rinks, etc. Different animals, they only produce coins and cannot exist leveled up. On the other hand, retrieving coins from fun stuff always takes just a single tap; the coins then get picked upward instantly. With animals, you have to tap to make the coins appear and then either tap the coins or await several seconds for them to automtically get nerveless – a scrap more work.

Both animals and fun stuff produce resources based on timers. They tin take anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 days in club to cough upwardly their coins. The idea behind games similar this is that you check on them throughout the 24-hour interval rather than tear through them for hours at a time.

Decorations

Trees, statues, flowers, and other inanimate objects can pretty upwards your hamlet. They as well increase the coin output of adjacent animals and fun stuff. Planning your hamlet layout to maximize the number of resource producers within the radius of decorations will result in amend long term payouts. But decorations cost coin and take up precious space, so you should probably expect until your community is well established before splurging on them.

Random events

While many of the resource producers in the game take hours or even days to dole out coins, Ice Historic period Village does provide some incentives to keep the game up and running for more a few minutes at a fourth dimension. The principal i is snow piles that randomly appear in open spaces throughout the hamlet; new ones won't bear witness upward when you resume the game after a period of inactivity. Snow piles contain coins, acorns, and tokens to play the Kung Fu Scrat minigame (which itself gives players a chance to win precious acorns).

Scrat, the rodent that audiences maliciously love seeing come up to impairment in the movies, also shows up at random intervals during active play. Take hold of him to get a coin bonus that increases based on your village level. For more details on catching Scrat and the Kung Fu Scrat minigame, look to our Achievement Guide.

Small earth after all

Ice Age Village encourages dumbo hamlet layouts in two ways. Outset, the bonus that decorations provide means y'all'll desire stuff amassed around them instead of spread out. 2d and more importantly, space itself is always at a premium.

Players start with only a small amount of usable space. Expansions come in modest batches at the cost of either coins or acorns. The coin cost increases exponentially with each expansion. Eventually, each new expansion costs a whopping x million coins more than than the ones earlier it. My level twoscore village produces between 300,000-500,000 coins a day, and so it will take weeks or months to expand in one case you hit that ten million money choke point. Gameloft wants usa playing long term, after all!

That density-oriented design underscores the game's two fundamental control issues. One, it's mode too easy to tap the wrong thing by mistake. I tin't count how many times I tried to make an animate being drop its coins only to select a different object instead. The problem especially annoys considering it would be so easy to ready. Just make it and then that a tap anywhere within a off-white radius of a structure that has coins or experience to give automatically picks that structure and NOT one that has zero to give. Bam, players would select far fewer objects by mistake.

The zooming controls besides demand major improvement. Now, I'm never a fan of pinching to zoom, but at least information technology works as intended virtually 90 per centum of the time in most games and apps. In this championship, it works one-half the time at most. Far too often I tried to zoom in but to zoom out and vice versa; other times the zoom level just didn't alter with the pinching movement. A unproblematic on-screen push button to toggle zoom levels would feel so much better, but at the very least Gameloft should tighten those pinching controls.

Finally, the Facebook and Gameloft Alive integration are broken at launch. Gameloft has promised an update to fix them, thankfully. In the meantime, visiting random villages works as long equally y'all don't tie either social account to the game.

Achievements

Different Real Soccer 2022, you can consummate this game without spending any existent money. Information technology will only take a very long time.

Many of the Achievements involve completing specific collections of animals – in other words, maxing out iv-member families of certain species that fall within a collection. A full of v animal families must be bought with acorns, the game's premium currency in order to get certain Achievements. Acorns are irksome to come by if you lot don't pony up and buy them with existent coin, merely at least grinding for them over fourth dimension is an option.

Check out our Achievement Guide for codes for free stuff and a more in-depth Achievement rundown!

Overall Impression

The general crappiness of Bug Hamlet may well crusade many Windows Phone gamers to be wary of Water ice Age Hamlet. Only if you actually attempt both games, Ice Age Hamlet is about a million times deeper and more competent than its last-gen competitor. True, the controls need piece of work, and the borked social features and mislabeled IAP prices all keep this one from perfection. Some of that volition get stock-still earlier long!

But the movie license is so well integrated and surprisingly charming in this context (I say this every bit someone who finds the movies insultingly stupid), and the number of animals and objects to buy so vast (even with the other versions' Dino World update MIA so far), that Ice Age Village still turns out better than average overall. Depression-stress games that users bank check in on intermittently throughout the day are a dandy fit for phones. Requite this ane a chance and stick with it as your hamlet gains a few levels. Y'all'll either go hooked or at least walk away a few Achievements richer.

Ice Age Village is a free 73 MB download for Windows Phone 8. Get it here from the Windows Phone Store.

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Source: https://www.windowscentral.com/ice-age-village-review-windows-phone

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