Mercury Meltdown
Ignition returns with a sequel that's bigger, better and more forgiving for starting players.
Published: October 17, 2006
Though it wasn't the first game announced for the PSP (that honor still belongs to Death Jr.), Archer Maclean's Mercury will forever stand as the first PSP game in our database. In the time between the first game's addition to the site and its sequel, 194 games were added, and yet despite all those other games and their various news stories, reviews, previews and media updates, Mercury still stands as one of the strongest showcases of the PSP hardware we ever saw.
It was utterly unique in approach and you really did get the sense that this was a game not possible on other handhelds -- at least not without some compromises. Best of all, it wasn't a port or a sequel to anything on the PS2 as so many PSP naysayers are key to point out about Sony's handheld library (and, in fact, in a funky little twist, the opposite is happening and Mercury Meltdown is coming to the PS2).
So now, nearly 200 games and a good year's time later, we're presented with Mercury Meltdown, a direct sequel that mixes things up a little, but never really deviates from the formula that the original put forth: guide a little blob of mercury around a maze-like course riddled with pitfalls and traps and get as much of the viscous liquid to the finish line as possible. Though things may have been just tweaked here and there (the game as a whole really wasn't broken anyway), they add up to a significantly more enticing offering for puzzle hounds.
The most immediate and obvious change is the overall look of the game. Gone is the cool, clean presentation of the original. In its place, is a bright, zealous (and, to be frank, rather gaudy) approach that adds thick cel-shaded borders and lines to the HUD. It stylizes things, yes, and adds much-needed tools like a color wheel for at-a-glance color combinations, but it is a bit unsightly at times. Luckily, it's mostly an aesthetic change and the rest of the game plays as well as the first one.
Actually, that's not true, it plays better, thanks largely in part to level designs that don't force you to wrestle with the camera (the face buttons now default to controlling rotation and angle while the shoulders let you zoom in and out). Things are flatter, now, or at the very least free of overhangs and outcroppings that seemingly intentionally hinder the view and just make what were already PSP-chuckingly hard levels that much more frustrating.
In fact, the difficulty as a whole is on a much more even keel. Perfectionists will still find themselves hung up on even the first couple levels as the ever-present desire to notch the top store for a level and pick up all bonuses and finish with 100% of the blob keeps things nice and challenging, but it's not a requirement, and if you just care about getting to the end and moving on to the next level, the game's new approach to presenting each new part of the game as labs rather than worlds won't stop you. It's just going to come down to how badly you want that cork stopper on top of those little vials that make up each level. You can only get 'em if you make it to the end with all of your mercury blob intact.
Okay, so it plays the same, but the little blob has undergone more than a few changes -- literally. Now, in addition to being painted with certain colors (which when combined form new colors, hence the color wheel), the blob can be heated or cooled or even hardened. Hot mercury breaks apart much more easily, and cooled mercury is much tougher to scoot up inclines, while hard mercury... well, it behaves just like a pinball, and there are amble pinball-style tracks to scoot them along.
It was utterly unique in approach and you really did get the sense that this was a game not possible on other handhelds -- at least not without some compromises. Best of all, it wasn't a port or a sequel to anything on the PS2 as so many PSP naysayers are key to point out about Sony's handheld library (and, in fact, in a funky little twist, the opposite is happening and Mercury Meltdown is coming to the PS2).
So now, nearly 200 games and a good year's time later, we're presented with Mercury Meltdown, a direct sequel that mixes things up a little, but never really deviates from the formula that the original put forth: guide a little blob of mercury around a maze-like course riddled with pitfalls and traps and get as much of the viscous liquid to the finish line as possible. Though things may have been just tweaked here and there (the game as a whole really wasn't broken anyway), they add up to a significantly more enticing offering for puzzle hounds.
The most immediate and obvious change is the overall look of the game. Gone is the cool, clean presentation of the original. In its place, is a bright, zealous (and, to be frank, rather gaudy) approach that adds thick cel-shaded borders and lines to the HUD. It stylizes things, yes, and adds much-needed tools like a color wheel for at-a-glance color combinations, but it is a bit unsightly at times. Luckily, it's mostly an aesthetic change and the rest of the game plays as well as the first one.
Actually, that's not true, it plays better, thanks largely in part to level designs that don't force you to wrestle with the camera (the face buttons now default to controlling rotation and angle while the shoulders let you zoom in and out). Things are flatter, now, or at the very least free of overhangs and outcroppings that seemingly intentionally hinder the view and just make what were already PSP-chuckingly hard levels that much more frustrating.
In fact, the difficulty as a whole is on a much more even keel. Perfectionists will still find themselves hung up on even the first couple levels as the ever-present desire to notch the top store for a level and pick up all bonuses and finish with 100% of the blob keeps things nice and challenging, but it's not a requirement, and if you just care about getting to the end and moving on to the next level, the game's new approach to presenting each new part of the game as labs rather than worlds won't stop you. It's just going to come down to how badly you want that cork stopper on top of those little vials that make up each level. You can only get 'em if you make it to the end with all of your mercury blob intact.
Okay, so it plays the same, but the little blob has undergone more than a few changes -- literally. Now, in addition to being painted with certain colors (which when combined form new colors, hence the color wheel), the blob can be heated or cooled or even hardened. Hot mercury breaks apart much more easily, and cooled mercury is much tougher to scoot up inclines, while hard mercury... well, it behaves just like a pinball, and there are amble pinball-style tracks to scoot them along.
