#Mercury meltdown revolution wii review series#

Only one button is employed – A – used in order to reassemble any split blobs, an act that incurs a time penalty. Easier said than done.Ĭontrols are of the pick-up-and-play variety, one thumbstick moves the pitch and roll of the course (gravity, and the PhysX engine from NVidia do the rest for the quicksilver) whilst the other manipulates the camera angle, spinning around the level and zooming in and out. They are: not losing any Mercury, keeping within the time limit and picking up any bonuses along the way. Your goal is to navigate a blob of Mercury through a course, which can range from a straight line to a labyrinthine route of twist and turns, and hit certain objectives. The three modes (not including the Tutorial levels) of Discovery, Challenge and Bonus levels guide you well through the quirks and new features that unfold with progression.

The menu screen, with its bright white glare and the beeps and pulses of the electronic score should settle you in nicely. If you’ve yet to sample the delights of a Mercury title then fear not, the aesthetic, core mechanics and tutorials are all the very essence of minimalism and simplicity. Will twin sticks be enough after the delights of the Wii’s revolution, or will sensitivity niggles that some highlighted in that game mean it finds a core traditional puzzler crowd once again with the familiarity of analogue sticks? With this being the Xbox LIVE Arcade version, it lacks the sixaxis implementation that marks the PlayStation 3’s copy as being in line with the creator’s original vision. Now, with the establishment of such mini puzzle staples on Sony and Microsoft’s online marketplace for all to sample, Mercury Hg (Hg being the chemical symbol, a nice little nod to the scientific crowd who’ll no doubt get a kick out of the level names being even more inventively named, quasi-elemental, pseudo-terms like “platformium”) arrives to see if the mechanics have aged or are as simplistically addictive as they seemed back in 2005.

The PlayStation 2’s Remix brought with it twin analogue stick control that greatly benefited seamless navigation and camera control, but it was only when the Wii version, Mercury Meltdown Revolution, hit the scene that the goal of motion control was finally realised (though admittedly the success of the game allowed for all these iterations to hit within the space of a couple of years). The sequel on PSP, released just a year later, continued with the same solid format, but again lacked the tilt sensor that was originally mooted as a peripheral and which the game seemed destined to incorporate in some manner.

#Mercury meltdown revolution wii review series#

After the original PSP puzzler Archer MacLean’s Mercury (taking its name from the lofty talents of the creator of such classics as International Karate - if you’ve yet to pick it up on the Wii virtual console shame on you! - and the adjunct of the heavy metal that would form the core of its gameplay) back in 2005 on the PlayStation Portable, the series has spawned several follow-ups of varying success.