Mercury Meltdown Revolution Review

You may think the Wii was made for first-person shooters, but you are wrong. The Wii was actually made for tilt puzzle games, and we’ve had a pretty good run so far with Super Monkey Ball and Kororinpa. Mercury Meltdown is a little different from those, however. It uses the Wii remote in its sideways position, for starters. This makes a huge difference. Holding the remote sideways with two hands is much less taxing on your wrists and gives you better control over the tilt movement. Honestly, this is the best way to control a game of this nature. As an added bonus, you can even fall back on the classic controller if shaky hands are causing you problems.

The bigger differentiation between this and other tilt games, though, is that Mercury Meltdown is not about rolling a ball around. It’s about rolling a blob of mercury around. Similarities exist, naturally, but it’s trickier managing a blob that can break apart and slip through small cracks. If you get too close to an edge, part of your blob will fall off. If you clip the corner of a wall, your blob may split into two pieces still controlled by you. Worst of all, if you hit a moving pad at the wrong angle, it’ll tear your blob apart and send the separate pieces in opposite directions. Patience plays a big role in games like this, and that is especially true for Mercury Meltdown. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and frustrated when you keep losing bits of your blob despite your best efforts.

Fortunately, it’s okay to lose some mercury. Very few levels require you to finish with a 100% intact blob. It’s possible to beat a level with only a small speck left. The downside to this is that you have to collect so much mercury before the next set of 16 levels will open, so you’ll end up coming back to the levels you barely finished and doing them right, anyway. But puzzles aren’t just about finishing with a full blob of mercury. You’re also up against a time limit. Don’t worry; once time runs out, you can still play and beat the level. You just won’t get a mark for finishing above par. On top of this, there are several bonuses to collect per level that go towards opening small rewards like new mercury skins. What’s nice about these requirements is that they don’t all have to be completed in the same run. You can shoot for 100% the first time, then sacrifice some mercury to pick up the bonuses in the next round.

That’s well and all, but the game can still be very frustrating. Many levels rely on color puzzles; you can’t depress a switch or pass through a gate unless your blob is of a certain color. This requires splitting your blob apart, coloring the different pieces by passing through paint stations, and combining them again to form a new color. Doesn’t sound too bad, except that it is a pain trying to coordinate two or three blobs without one of them falling off or two of them touching before their time is due. And while this is going on, the camera is having a heart attack, because it doesn’t know which blob to look at. It will either zoom way out to keep them all in check or keep watching the biggest piece while the smaller pieces go get into trouble. You have full control over the camera, though, as every button on the remote manages some portion of it, whether it’s rotating, tilting, or zooming… or even switching which blob to focus on.

Levels get progressively harder, of course, and with over 150 levels in the game, it’s a safe bet the last several will give you nightmares. The amount of levels is great, because you can always fall back on and finish up the easier ones if the later levels are too difficult. It’s not always about navigating through a maze, either, as levels incorporate lots of moving platforms, escalators, fans, gravity-switching pads, and little monsters that like to eat certain colored mercury. There are also places where you can change your mercury into a solid ball or heat/cool it to change its viscocity. Things get further complicated by just how wacky some levels are. One in particular is a cube that you have to travel around, and each side is a maze/puzzle in its own.

You will no doubt start each level at a slow, nervous pace, but each retry sees you speeding through the first bits faster and faster. It’s very satisfying to skim a section that once gave you all kinds of grief. The allure of the game, then, is the sense of accomplishment (and relief) you feel once you finally beat a puzzle. They are nerve-racking and full of close calls, so when the blob finally hits the finish pad, you’re entirely justified to jump out of your seat and dance like a monkey. My favorite parts of games like Super Monkey Ball and Kororinpa, however, are impossible to do here. Because this is a blob, you can’t really bounce it in an attempt to find wild and outrageous shortcuts. They layout of a level ends up being very strict, too, what with all the color-matching and locked doors. But when you do find a shortcut, it’s always something amazing. Recognizing that this is bound to happen, the game also provides eight slots for saved replays. Thank you!

My real qualm, though, is a deal-breaker. Are you ready to hear this? Mercury Meltdown features no multiplayer mode whatsoever. Several sources said it could go up to two players, but they obviously didn’t test it out, because you can’t. This is strictly one-player material. It’s odd, too, because the game labels the puzzle mode as “single player” and even includes a “party mode” with five mini-games. It should be mandated that you can’t call anything a party unless it is multiplayer. And the mini-games ended up being kind of fun, too. One game involves you trying to paint more of the level with your blob than the computer. In another, you shove your blob across the floor and onto a target, bouncing it off walls to pick up multipliers. Ah, how they would have been so much better with two-player support.

On the graphical side, Mercury Meltdown looks really nice. It is meant to be cartoony, and the cel-shaded style is a perfect fit. The game also runs in 480p and widescreen mode, which is a commendable gesture since a game this simple could skimp wherever possible. Along those lines, Mercury Meltdown also features an astounding tracklist of over 50 different background tunes. I have a feeling much of this music is from previous Mercury games, but still– that’s a lot of music! The majority of it is good, too. It varies from techno to rock to Latin to classical, even. Songs play randomly, though, and there’s no way to turn off songs you don’t like. So it can be difficult trying to do a particularly tough puzzle against a particularly annoying piece of music.

Final Comments

After all this, I’m still looking for the quintessential tilt puzzle game. Somebody needs to take everything good from Mercury Meltdown Revolution, Super Monkey Ball, and Kororinpa and make the ultimate Wii game. So what does Mercury Meltdown do right, then? The controls are perfect, and the amount of content is staggering. It just lacks a much-needed multiplayer mode, and the whole blob concept can grow a bit tedious. The winning factor, though, is that it’s priced just right. $20 is usually relegated to crap and garbage, but Mercury Meltdown really gives you your money’s worth. I would not pay $50 or even $40 for something like this, but $20 is a steal.