Mercury Meltdown - The Definitive Review
Imagine a game that looks hideous, plays brilliantly, is tough and unforgiving and looks hideous. Putting it onto a conveyor belt that passes through a machine that makes noises that appear as speech bubbles in the air like ‘zoink!’ and ‘kap kap kap!’ and what do you have at the other end? A near-perfect puzzle game.
It’s friendly, it still plays brilliantly, it doesn’t make your eyes bleed. Puzzles make sense. Levels can be traversed without having to flip the camera a hundred times just to see where your blob is. There’s shortcuts, like Super Monkey Ball (but not as good because nothing’s as good as Super Monkey Ball). The analogue nub is still shit, but it kind of makes sense that a blob of liquid metal wouldn’t be completely responsive. And a million other small but brilliant changes to the game that are so obvious you wonder why they weren’t included in the original.
The colour mixing guide in the top right - THANK FUCK FOR THAT! Who in their right minds actually mixes colours according to the spectrum of light rules and not the poster paint rules? Green is made by mixing blue and yellow, you dumbfucks. Green is not a primary colour when dealing with solids. I know you have to keep the rules the same as they were in the original, so thanks for putting the colour guide where I can see it.
This game needs to be on the 360, STAT.
I don’t mind that it’s cel-shaded. A million games use it these days and it’s, I suppose, a decent enough look if you’re trying not to offend too many people, but bringing in somebody who can work crayons might have elevated the game to Lumines heights of recognition. I say recognition and not brilliance because Lumines is fucking shit. Either way, Meltdown looks about a million times better than Mercury ever did.
Archer Maclean left the company between Mercury and Mercury Meltdown and the game became a million times better. Magazines made by Imagine Publishing have been reviewing this game badly and I have no idea why. Someone suggested to me that the reason why Imagine’s magazines have slated the game is because they’re loyal to Archer, who contributes regularly to some of their magazines. I don’t know about that. All I know is, even if this kind of game is not your bag, a sub-80 per cent score is a poor judgement.
You might not like heavy metal, but you can’t say they don’t have fucking brilliant drummers.
There’s some minigames too, which are good and not shit.
BUY THIS GAME, IT’S FUCKING BRILLIANT.
For - maximum interactivity with never-before-seen highly-anticipated features.
Against - if you don’t like this kind of game you might not like this kind of game.
Scores:
Graphics - better but not sophisticated out of 10
Sound - there’s definitely some and they’re quite good out of 10
Playability - 1,000,000 out of 10
Replayability - nearly infinite out of 10
Overall - 9 out of 10