Have you been waiting for a new hockey game to sink your hockey mask teeth into? Well, Herocraft may just have the thing for you. Ice Rage has actually been around for awhile exclusively for iOS, but it has recently been ported to Android so we had to try it out and see what all the fuss was about.
The premise of Ice Rage is dead simple. You have your one hockey player, your opponent has one player, and you each have a goalie. Now go! The game is dead easy to pick up; the controls are restricted to the movement joystick on the bottom left corner and one button in the bottom right for hitting the puck. Tap for a hit, hold for a power shot. In fact, the game will even allow you to play with just one button, eliminating the need to even control your player. How easy is that? On the other end of the spectrum when playing on hard difficulty, the movement of your player also controls the movement of your goalie. I tried this for a short time and simply put, it is mind-melting. Nevertheless, Ice Rage is insanely fun though frustrating at times. Often you’ll find yourself circling the puck trying to get to it before your opponent, though that’s less the fault of the game as it is the nature of ice hockey.
Ice Rage has 3 modes for single-player Quick Match, Tournament and Rage-off. Quick Match is pretty self-explanatory; a simple one-on-one, most points in 1 minute, 45 seconds wins. Tournament pits you against 10 opponents and allows you to upgrade your character with each opponent you beat. Rage-Off is the kind of mode that you’ve always wanted in a hockey game but never got till now; each player is given a health bar and to win, you whittle down your opponent’s health by scoring and checking them when you don’t have the puck. It works quite well and is satisfyingly violent, as any hockey game should be.
Multi-player gives you the same game modes except Tournament and allows you and a friend to play the game on the same screen. I really like this as there has been a huge lack of games lately that allow 2 players to play on the same device. The perspective in multi-player is shifted slightly as the players control their characters from behind their own goal giving each a good view of the mayhem from their perspective. My only concern with this arrangement is that while I was reviewing this game on my Nexus 7 which provided ample screen real estate, I fear that the hockey rink would be quite small on a smartphone screen. All the same, multi-player retains the frantic game-play of the single-player and I think a definite winner for deciding who has to take out the trash.
I’d also like to give an honourable mention to the art style of the game. I think the whole block-head, cube-craft style is adorable and also functionally makes the game a lot easier to follow, even with all the frantic action. The character models and types are diverse and suitably insane (“Enviro-bear”?) and should you be so inclined, you can purchase even more character models to show off to your buddies.
If you’re looking for a simple, frantic hockey game for one or two people, look no further than Ice Rage. And for only $0.99, it’s hard to go wrong.
Game: Ice Rage
Price: $0.99
