Mercury Meltdown Remix

Rating ESRB: Everyone Genre puzzle Publisher Ignition Entertainment External Links Official Mercury Meltdown Remix Website

When I was in middle school, our class went on a field trip to a space station. After all of the educational issues were handled, the students were allowed to spend their hard-borrowed allowance in the souvenir shop. Amidst the foil packages of freeze-dried ice cream and buckets of space slime, a young and intelligent gentleman found a wonderful value for the low price of 4.99 plus tax. It was a simple concept, but one that would keep that young gentleman and his friends entertained for many hours. The objective was to guide a small blob of mercury to the middle of a maze encased in a plexiglass disk.

About sixteen years later, much of the mercury in that maze ended up encrusted along the edges of the maze itself, although the blob was still a decent size. The maze was undamaged and still provided the same great entertainment throughout the years. A thought occurred: What if the 21st century intervened on behalf of the archaic mercury maze? Would there ever be a video game based around such an idea?

Unknown to myself and many other gamers worldwide, Ignition Entertainment was hard at work on the problem, apparently for a second time. Mercury Meltdown Remix was their solution. Using the analog stick, the player tilts the playing field a-la-Labyrinth, using the tilt to guide a blob of mercury through each individual board. There are eight labs that provide sixteen levels of blob-bending action. Finish each maze with as much mercury as possible in order to unlock the next lab for play. Collect bonus spheres to unlock mini-games such as Shove (Mercury curling), Metrix (Mercury puzzle blocks) and Mercury racing.

It's not a normal run-of-the-mill mazefest. Use paint machines to mix and match blob colors in order to enter certain doors or, in some cases, finish the maze. Each board is littered with doors that open based on the maze's tilt, attractor and repulsor nodes, springboards, guillotines, pressure switches and mercury-eating monsters, just to name a few features. Upon maze completion, a ghost blob is set up to duplicate your best run. Use the ghost feature to challenge your best time in order to improve you navigational skills.

The package is pretty, but the product is second-rate. Gameplay is horrendously basic, if not tedious. Obtaining bonus nodes is next-to-impossible in some areas and the ease of finishing each maze is quite tempting. There's hardly any incentive to explore options or challenge possible solutions. Moving from board to board reveals an unplanned assortment of various bells and whistles in lieu of variety and structure.

Mercury Meltdown Remix is nothing more than a failed attempt at revitalizing a novel child's toy. Fear not, faithful gamers, for titles such as these are merely a sign of the times. Once the next-gen consoles make their appearance, there will often be a mad scramble for filler during the remainder of the previous system's run. Hopefully, this will not be a common occurrence.