To progress through each level you will need to figure out how to plot a course through various colour-coded gates and switches. This involves you having to spray your mercury using canny little paint spraying bays to make sure you are the correct colour to pass through a gate or activate a switch. You’ll also need to learn to split and recombine different colour red, blue and green blobs, in order to mix up new colours to progress further. A very cool new feature in Mercury Meltdown is the ability to heat and cool your mercury, thus causing it to either liquify further and become faster, or to cool and become slower. You can even turn the blob into a solid pinball to navigate bits of some levels, which is where the game’s nod to Marble Madness becomes delightfully clear.
So, apart from good old Archer not being involved (hence the name change), what else is new about Mercury Meltdown? Firstly, it’s thankfully much easier and far less exasperating to play. This doesn’t mean that it’s
easy by any stretch of even the most hardcore puzzle gamer’s imagination, just that the analogue control is notably improved, the in-game camera works much better than before and the play-balancing has been set to enjoyably-playable instead of piss-takingly hard.
For example, this time round the ‘par’ timer on each level is not a set time-limit in which you have to complete the puzzles to reach the maze’s finish square. Instead, it varies, but once it runs out you can still complete the level, you merely have a frowny little man in the corner of the screen instead of a smiley little man… Yet unless you are a gaming buffoon, after a few trial goes on each level, you’ll become skilful enough to finally beat the timer, which means you’ll satisfyingly gain yet more bonus multiplier points at the end of the level. This gives each of the game’s (impressive) 160-odd levels a much greater replayability, because once you have solved the basic puzzle structure of the maze, you will want to try it again and again, to shave just a little more time from your MBPB (Mercury Blobathon Personal Best).
Secondly, Meltdown looks loads better than the first game, having been treated to a funky/clubby graphical makeover, with a bit of cel-shading thrown in for good measure. Plus, there’s loads more
better content including shed loads of single-player stages and decent multiplayer options - although annoyingly your mate will have to own the game too before you can get involved in some multiplayer mercury blob-racing fun.
There’s also the requisite bunch of party games (‘the new gaming black’), of which the Tetris-a-like one is perhaps the most pleasant diversion. Developers, Ignition Banbury, have also included a downloadable option in the main menu, which suggests that further levels will be made available to keep the most hardened fans happy once they’ve exhausted the many levels on offer.
Gripes? Surprisingly few: the cheesy techno soundtrack gets a bit annoying at times, but then you just turn it down or off and put your iPod on instead if it gets on your wick. Some of the levels were still ‘piss-takingly’ hard, but not too many, which in the masochistic mind of the true hardcore puzzler is how it should be. The control can get annoying, but this is more a result of the PSP’s tiddy little analogue stick, than a fault of the game. It’s the hardware which needs improving to make these kinds of games work better on the PSP – a fact which SPOnG noted in our review of the PSP version of Super Monkey Ball earlier this year.
SPOnG Score: B+
Overall, if you are a fan of puzzle games and own a PSP, Mercury Meltdown is a no-brainer, must-buy title. A huge improvement on the original, successfully delivering pretty much everything which that title initially promised.
