Ice Age Village 3.6.6a

Ooh, this one brings back memories. Not that I have a fondness for the Ice Age universe. Milking a franchise to death is a sure way to make me uninterested in it. That goes for Star Wars too. The memories that I'm talking about are the ones from the time I was play-testing Ice Age Village. Yep, I'm in part responsible for releasing this exercise in futility of a game on the Play Store.

I happened to enroll in their tester army, back when Gameloft still had an interest for developing solid games. Actually, during my brief time there I witnessed first hand the quality degradation that was beginning to plague their products. Of course, I'm talking about the freemium concept. Gameloft was starting to offer free versions of their existing games. That looked like a nice marketing move. Offer gamers a way to test your product and then purchase a feature unlock if they wish to. However, from this innocent beginning, the company forced the creative minds to spawn the most worthless, most shameful money grabber I have ever encountered.

Ice Age Village has a concept that is so astoundingly idiotic, that my entire testing team was a bit confused on the first day we worked on it. And rightfully so; After the likes of Asphalt 6 or N.O.V.A 2, Ice Age Village was looking like a pre-pre-alpha map editor with animated characters shuffling around, doing nothing.

Unsurprisingly, that state of affairs perfectly evoked the eventual 'gameplay' of Ice Age Village. The main activity consists of tapping on buildings to collect coins and buying new buildings when you've gathered enough. Most buildings are considered to be 'nests', each containing one of the species which might or might not have appeared in the Ice Age movies. Initially, each nest holds one specimen, but a second one can be bought right away, after which the third and fourth come with a cooldown timer as they are considered cubs, chicks or whatever those things allegedly produce.

Besides collecting gold, you will also need to feed the nests. Whoa, don't get excited yet. Feeding a nest is actually an extra tap that you need to perform after collecting gold. When you first notice it, it makes no sense why you would need to tap twice on the same building. However, after having built some more, you will notice a pattern starting to emerge. After tapping in sequence to collect gold from all the buildings, you will repeat the sequence again in order to "feed" them, essentially doubling the actual gameplay volume that you might otherwise have, and prolonging your investment in the game, Right? Wrong!

Foreseeable rant

Ice Age Village was most likely intended to be interesting to a very, VERY young audience. The kind of children that are neglected by their parents, and who usually get distracted by tablets and TV sets for entire evenings. This kinds of examples show how bad our culture and society has gone off the rail. Guess who we have to thank for that?