Who would have thought a video game based around the element mercury could be interesting? After all most of us only hear about this because it makes fish toxic to eat. Nonetheless some guy named Archer Maclean decided to make a puzzle title where you guide blobs of this chemical around stages by actually tilting the stages. Think Marble Madness, but with toxic chemicals instead. It was met with decent reception, and must have sold well enough because we got a sequel a year later. This was called Mercury Meltdown, and it made slightly bigger waves than it’s predecessor. Today we’re going to be taking a look at this forgotten game. Is Mercury Meltdown on PSP worth checking out? Let’s give it a look!
Because this is a puzzle game there’s no real story to speak of. You’re thrown right into the action. Mercury Meltdown is a completely 3D puzzle game wherein you use the PSP’s analog nub to tilt the environment in any direction. Your goal is to manipulate a blob of mercury with this to complete basic challenges and reach the goal at the end of each stage. Sounds pretty simple, right? Well not so fast. Mercury Meltdown can be absolutely dastardly in its level designs. You will need to pay close attention to momentum because this blob does not stop on a dime. Additionally there are a ton of different hazards to deal with. Mercury Meltdown is often clever, but always challenging.
Your basic goal is to guide the mercury blob to the end of the stage. Unfortunately there’s a boat load of stuff in your way. Sometimes you’ll face environmental hazards that can destroy it. You can also roll this off of a ledge to its certain doom. Of course it’s not one hit kills. In this case getting hit will simply shrink your mercury ball. You can also lose mass by getting too close to an edge, but without falling over. The mercury that overhangs will simply fall down and be lost. You are given a meter on the left side of the screen to indicate how much mass you still have which is very helpful.
One of the most interesting aspects of gameplay here is that your blob can split into multiple different pieces. You’ll find sharp edges in the environment that will slice right through it, and you can even get hung up on the wall in a way that causes it to break. This feature is important because many of the puzzles are based entirely on around it. There are several different ways Mercury Meltdown integrates it. In some areas you have to hit multiple switches in a stage at the same time. Other times you’ll have to turn them into different colors to activate specific switches at once. I actually found the feature most interesting when I was simply trying to figure out the fastest way to beat a stage. I’m sure speedrunners will love it.
I mentioned earlier that the mercury blob can change color. This serves very specific purposes and can only be done at paintshops which indicate which shade it’ll be painted into. The base colors it can change into are red, blue and green. Often you’ll see switches which open areas and these can only be activated when the blob is of the same color indicated. Sometimes there are two and they require a different hue to be activated. This is a situation in which you’ll have to split the blob and guide both of them into separate paintshops. It gets really tricky with this aspect because sometimes you’ll accidentally change to the wrong color. These paintshops are used both as helpful items as well as obstacles in some cases.
To make things even more tricky you have additional colors with no corresponding paintshops. These include silver, turquoise, pink, and yellow. So how then do you convert your blob into these special colors? By separating into two different pieces, hitting different paintshops, and then re-combining. This is where things get tricky. I struggled with this a little bit. Thankfully there’s an RGB diagram in the top right section of the screen showing which colors you need to combine to get the specific results you’re looking for. The puzzles based around this aspect get really complicated later on. Sometimes you’ll need to have multiple blobs of different colors at the same time on the playfield, and manipulating these at the same time is tough. It can be especially hard not to accidentally combine them.
Gameplay is much more fun than it sounds. You need faster reflexes than in most puzzle titles, and some of the stages took me a moment to figure out what I needed to do to progress. Due to the short level structure it’s perfectly suited for pick up and play in short bursts. Mercury Meltdown, while derivative of several different other video games, has enough of its own ideas to feel like a totally unique experience. Although the premise is grounded in the likes of Marble Madness and Super Monkey Ball the concept of flowing chemicals, coloring them, and splitting into smaller globs really adds its own flavor to the genre. Mercury Meltdown might not be quite as replayable as the aforementioned games but that doesn’t make it any less fun.
There’s quite a bit of content squeezed into this singular UMD. The main game has seventeen different levels (spread out between various worlds ‘or laboratories). These contain achievements in them for completion in different ways. You can unlock additional content by collecting all of the special star icons, completing a stage with one hundred percent of your lead, and more. Aside from the main game you’ll find other modes as well. One of these is the playground which is a large circular area that lets you basically test combinations and strategies. It’s kind of a neat distraction. There’s also an ad-hoc multiplayer option that lets you race an opponent through stages you’ve unlocked. I haven’t had a chance to test that one, but it sounds like a nice concept.
Then we have several mini-games. These are unlocked as you play the main game. The first of these, rodeo, has you attempting to keep your blob atop a platform while being blown around by wind. Next up is race which is pretty self explanatory. Metrix is the most puzzle-oriented of the bunch and has you manipulating sizes and shapes of blobs to try to make them fit into specific spaces. Shove is kind of like curling, but of course, with mercury blobs. There are also hazards on the course which make things a little more interesting. Paint is my most favorite. Here you’re trying to color a tray by rolling your mercury blob over it to cover a wider area than your opponent. All of these are supposedly playable in multiplayer mode, and I imagine it would be a lot of fun. Again I haven’t been able to try it.
Unfortunately I’m not a big fan of the graphics in Mercury Meltdown. It uses a combination of cel shading and textured polygons. The end result is less than spectacular visually. It just looks unpleasant. The mercury blob itself is primarily what’s cel shaded. This is an odd choice in my opinion. It would have been more interesting with more reflections and detail in my opinion. The backgrounds are really boring in design. It’s usually flat shaded boxes and ground with very little detail, and drab grays/blacks. The soundtrack is also kind of unimpressive. It’s a mix of rock and electronic beats, but it isn’t really cohesive. I opted to mostly leave the sound off in this case.
