Review: Mercury Meltdown Revolution for Wii
Overview: Mercury Meltdown Revolution is the third in a series of games that started with Archer Maclean’s Mercury on PSP. This incarnation appears on the Wii and takes advantage of the Wiimote’s motion sensitivity to control your little blob of mercury. Along the same spirit of Marble Madness, MMR is an actiony puzzle game where you have to guide an coagulated ball of mercury around various levels filled with various traps, tricks, and mazes. Oh, and did I mention it’s a budget title? Let’s see if it’s worth your 20 bucks.
Shininess: Being on the Wii, it’s not gonna be the super duper bright and shiny that you might find on the 360. But also being a basic puzzle game instead of an experiment on theoretical physics or a nightmare survival in a submerged steampunk dystopia, it doesn’t really need them new-fangled grafficks that all the kids want. Obviously, if it was on the 360, it’d look sharper, but the game doesn’t suffer for not being so. In other words, the graphics are good enough, but nothing to write home about. Though the way the blob of mercury rolls around and pools against walls is pretty nifty.
The game also has a quirky little soundtrack. Again, nothing to blow your mind, but it’s pretty good. At the very least, it’s not repetitive and irritating which can happen sometimes in lesser known puzzle games.
Funness: I was looking forward to trying out this game, since I love Marble Madness so much, but I was not terribly optimistic. I wasn’t sure how much more they could do with rolling something around a maze. As it turns out, there’s actually quite a bit more they can do with it. There are lots of traps and other interactive objects that give it more depth than just another maze game. I couldn’t tell you for sure how many of these have appeared in the previous games in the series, so I’m going to approach them as if they’re new because they’re new to me.
The main mechanism that I find the most interesting is the color changing. You can roll your little blob into paint sprays that will change its color. There are various gates and pressure switches that will only react if your mercury is the correct color. Sometimes, you’ll have to force your blob to hit a corner and split up into two pieces, make one hit a red spray and one hit a blue spray and then bring them back together to make purple. It’s pretty fun.
Because your blob can split up, just falling over the edge and losing isn’t that simple. If you happen to barely catch yourself right before you’re gonna fall, you might lose some of your mercury, but not all of it and still be able to finish the level. Of course, some levels require you to have a certain amount left in order to activate certain switches and you get more points for saving more when you finish.
There are lots of various obstacles to get in your way, things that push you, things that suck you in, things that blow you up into the air, and things that splatter you. There really is quite a wide variety in this game, so I have yet to run into a level that feels like I’m doing the same thing as another. The game is quite challenging without being annoyingly so.
Worthiness: I honestly think this game is a little gem in the Wii’s library that lots of people are probably going to miss. I’m enjoying it quite a bit. On top of having 150+ levels to go through, there is some replay value in each if you go back and try to get a perfect score on each level by collecting all the bonus icons and trying to make it to the exit point with every drop of your mercury. And you get bonus points for doing it within a certain amount of time. The game also has some unlockable mini-games that are more about survival rather than hitting and end goal. They’re kinda fun, but not that big of a deal. If this were a full-priced Wii title, I’d scoff and move on, but it’s not. This game is a budget title and rightfully so. At 20 bucks, I’d say it’s a worthy buy if you’re a fan of puzzle games, and especially if you liked Marble Madness or Super Monkey Ball. If you’re looking for some games to fill out your Wii shelf, this is one of them.
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Score: 4/5 Buy it!
