Gameloft and Fox Interactive’s new social game which based on the Ice Age movies - Ice Age Village will be will be released on April 5th. As you’d expect, the game is freemium. It’s completely free to play, according to Touchgen.

Called Ice Age Village, it puts you in control of the main charaters from the films, and a blank area of wilderness in which you must build the perfect environment for them to thrive. Complete quests (such as creating a family of sloths), side missions, and additional daily challenges to keep your village growing and to earn points. As you level up, you will be able access to new characters, buildings and decorations.

As you’d expect, the game is freemium. It’s completely free to play, but much like the Simpsons social game, you can speed things up by purchasing acorns with real cash.

It wouldn’t be much of a social game without allowing you to invite your friends to your village. Over Gameloft LIVE & Facebook friends can visit your village, and likewise you can visit your friends’ villages, and even get rewarded for lending a hand.

By far the more interesting aspect of the game were the Scrat mini games. He’s easily the best character from the films, even though he only gets a few minutes screen time each outing. These mini games can be placed within your environment and accessed using acorns to play. One of these involved fending off some prehistoric piranhas using Scrats newly acquired kung-fu skills.

Visually the game looks like your standard social game. None of it is rendered in full 3D and instead relies on pre-rendered sprites in an isometric view. While it does make good use of the Ice Age assets, it’s not quite as well executed as the Simpsons game for example. Once again it came down to the Scrat mini games to deliver the best visuals, and fun.

For those of you who love Farmville-like social games, and are fans of the series, then you will no doubt get a kick out of this.

Ice Age Village will be released on April 5th. Updates will be added at a later date, including new characters, buildings, quests and mini-games… Plus exclusive sneak peeks of the new film, Ice Age: Continental Drift, released later this year.

via Touchgen