Mercury Meltdown Remix Review

Years ago, a game came out in the arcade and on the NES called Marble Madness in which you had to guide a marble through hazardous terrains to a finish line within a time limit. Then, a few years ago, Sega came out with Super Monkey Ball. Now Ignition has added to the genre with Mercury Meltdown Remix, a game which takes the concept of those two games and adds immensely to it. Do these additions add or detract from the game, and is the result worth playing? Read on to find out.

Graphically, Mercury Meltdown Remix is set to a very cartoony graphical scheme. Still, this graphical scheme looks very appropriate for a game of this type, and looks reasonably well done also. The graphics do not seem particularly detailed all of the time, but they are certainly detailed enough to get the job done in a game of this type. Everything does look nice, and nothing in the graphics prevents you from knowing what you’re dealing with when you go into a level. Overall, these graphics may not be the best the PS2 can offer, but they’re certainly decent.

In terms of sound, the music is not the type that is going to distract you from the game. The sound effects certainly sound appropriate given the environment of balls of mercury rolling around, splitting apart, etc. The tutorial is done with text boxes, however, and there is no voice acting to speak of in the game. You could probably play this game while listening to a CD and not lose out on much of any importance. Still, the sound in this game is not bad either.

In terms of gameplay, the basic concept is the same as that in Marble Madness or Super Monkey Ball, that is, getting your mercury to the finish line as fast as possible. There are two differences, however. One, you are allowed to continue after the clock has expired but will simply not get any points for beating the par time. Two, the game is a lot more complex than just getting a blob to the finish line.

How is this game more complicated? Is it because there are things trying to attack you or push you off the stage or make it harder for you to progress? No, because those elements are present in Marble Madness and Super Monkey Ball. One difference lies in Mercury Meltdown Remix’s color mechanic. Some doors, switches, finish pads, etc. will require the blob that utilizes them to be a particular color. As such, switching the color of your blob is a big thing in this game.

How then do you change the color of your blob? There are two ways to do so. First of all, you can run your blob under a color-changing machine to switch it to whatever color the machine is pumping out. Second, if two blobs run into each other, regardless of their relative size (more on this later), they will form into one blob in the composite color that results from mixing the two. Obviously, this color mechanic makes the game far more complex than Super Monkey Ball was.

But there’s one other thing that makes the game more complicated, and that’s the fact that, in many levels, you’ll have to deal with multiple blobs of mercury at once. When you have multiple blobs of mercury that you’re dealing with, whether it’s because the level started with more than one or because you ran into something that split your blob, your control of the blobs will be all together, meaning that when you hit left on the analog stick, all of the blobs will move left. This can get complicated when you’re trying to get the blobs to run into each other or especially when you need to finish the level with multiple blobs and thus get them all onto the proper finish pads simultaneously. Even more than color-changing, this can create a lot of hassle for the player.

When you do something that separates your blobs, you can create blobs of different sizes. Smaller blobs tend to move faster than larger ones, but when it comes to color-combining, it makes no difference how big the blobs involved are, only what colors they are. That at least is a nice touch as it often saves you the trouble of trying to split a blob into equal-sized pieces.

You might be asking yourself though, “If there’s no time limit, how then do I lose a level?” I’m glad you asked. You can lose in two ways. First of all, you can lose portions of mercury if they fall off the edge of the screen or get eaten, or other things like that. If you lose enough to the point where you cannot activate pressure switches in levels with those, you will lose, or, otherwise, you can lose by losing all of your mercury. On the other hand, you can also lose if you lose portions of your mercury that you needed to become the color that you would need to finish the level. So yeah, despite the lack of a time limit, failing a level will not only occur, but it will likely occur often, especially in the harder levels.

Depending on how good you are at this type of game, it is possible that you might finish the game in a matter of a few hours. It is not by any means a lengthy game. Still, the game brings with it a reasonable amount of replay value. First of all, the game keeps track of how much mercury you saved in each level, so you can go back and try to improve on those numbers. Secondly, each level has a certain number of bonus icons that can be collected, so you can go back and collect any of those that you may have missed. Third, as you collect the aforementioned bonus icons, you can unlock party games to play. Oh, and, if you are so inclined, the game also keeps track of your score in each level so you could go back and try to improve on those.

How do the party games fare? Their overwhelming weakness is that Mercury Meltdown Remix is exclusively a one-player game, and that includes the party games. As a result, the party games won’t really be anything that will be worth playing for too long unless you are one of those people who enjoys playing games over and over to try to get a higher score. Still, the party games do provide for a bit of diversion from the main game once in a while, so their presence isn’t detrimental by any means.

What then is my conclusion? Mercury Meltdown Remix is a game that could easily be enjoyed by the fanbases of Marble Madness and/or Super Monkey Ball. Still, this game fails to capture quite the level of excitement captured by Super Monkey Ball and, as a result, certainly isn’t for everybody. If you’re looking for a reasonably fun game that is going to make you think, Mercury Meltdown Remix is probably a good choice, but if you are the type of gamer who is looking for mindless entertainment, look elsewhere.