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Mercury is famous for being the only common metal that is liquid at normal temperatures. Mercury has the symbol Hg, which comes from the Latin word hydrargyrum meaning liquid silver. Mercury is classified as a Transition Metal and has an Atomic Mass of 200.59 amu and a Melting Point of -38.87 °C (234.28 °K, -37.966 °F). While this is all very interesting, to many it will seem quite dull and difficult to take in, requiring 100 percent concentration. In many ways Mercury on the PSP is very similar – interesting, but oh so difficult.
Mercury on the PSP is from the famed games designer Archer Maclean, probably best known for his Snooker and Billiard games. Essentially you must guide a blob of Mercury around a series of stages achieving the objectives set out at the beginning of each stage. These objectives will usually be to reach the end of the stage or lighting up a number of switches, with the amount of Mercury remaining and time taken also being important. The game plays similarly to Super Monkey Ball, except in Mercury you tilt the environment and have no direct control of the Mercury glob.
When you begin playing Mercury the only available game world to play in is the Tutorial world, which comprises of a series of levels designed to help you learn how the game is played. These are all pretty simple stages, but do give you a grounding, which is necessary if you want to have any chance of completing the later stages. Each world is split into a series of stages of differing types: Race Levels, which are simply straightforward time challenges; Percentage Levels where you must reach the desired goal with the specified amount of Mercury remaining, Task Levels, where beacons must be activated; Combo Levels, where more than two disciplines will be required; and finally, Boss Levels, where all three disciplines are combined (completing the Boss Level on each world will unlock the next world). Once you’ve completed the tutorials you’ll unlock the ‘Quartz’ world, which is the second of a total of 6 worlds (with a combined total of 72 stages), and things begin to get a lot tougher.
It might sound fairly basic, but there’s much more to Mercury than it initially appears. For starters, your Mercury blob can split-up into many smaller blobs, all of which are in danger of falling off the level or being removed in a number of other ways. Once the blob separates, keeping control of all the blobs becomes very difficult and moves must be carefully planned so not to lose the liquid metal. The Mercury blobs can also change colour, either by rolling into a paint shop or mixing with other blobs of Mercury. Paint shops will instantly paint the blob the colour indicated, but blob colour mixing is not so straightforward. You have your standard silver colour as well as the primary colours: red, blue and green. Combinations of these colours will create secondary colours: Blue and Red makes Magenta, Blue and Green makes Cyan, Green and Red makes Yellow, and all three primary colours combine to make silver. Colour changing isn’t just for fun, with certain gates and switches only working for a specific colour of mercury.
Stages are also populated with many objects and elements which you must avoid or take advantage of in order to complete the stage. You’ll find switches, doors and moving platforms, but also more elaborate objects, such as Grav Benders which invert the local gravity field, and transporters, which are pretty self explanatory. Your mercury blob will also encounter several unfriendly obstacles such as the Mercoid, a black ball which eats Mercury, so you should stay clear of these at all times.
Once you’re faced with multiple blobs of Mercury, each a different colour, you’ll quickly realise just how difficult this game can be. At times it can be difficult enough to keep track of each blob, let alone stay clear of dangerous obstacles scattered around each stage. Rather than gradually increasing the difficulty is seems that the game’s designers have decided to throw the player in at the deep end. This may put a lot of people off as, although the stages are definitely possible, they will take many attempts to pass, and the game doesn’t help you out, giving you very little information on what you need to do in each stage.
Another problem is that when you get stuck on a stage you’re pretty much left with nothing else to do until you pass that stage. You can’t go onto another stage and come back to the difficult one later, which means you’ll often turn the game off in frustration as you become more and more enraged with the “f@!#ing impossible stage”. I did this after my first few hours with the game and was even more foul mouthed when I discovered that my progress had not been saved. Mercury doesn’t have an auto save feature, so make sure you exit back and manually save before you turn the game off, an annoyance that could have easily been avoided.
Mercury also includes wireless two-player action, where you simply race against your opponent to finish the stage. The mode works by showing you a ghost of the opponent and the two players cannot interact in the game world, essentially making the game a glorified time trial mode, as seen in many racing games where you race against a ghost car. The multiplayer seems like it has been tacked on as an afterthought, rather being a worthwhile addition to the game. Most of the game’s longevity will come from attempting to beat the high score for each of the 72 stages, which will take many a frustrating hour to achieve.
Being a game about precise control, a lot rests on the PSP’s analogue stick. I know that there are a lot of people who dislike the unusual analogue stick on the PSP, but it works just fine in Mercury, with delicate movements that are essential for completing tricky stages being no problem at all. Other than tilting the game world, there is little more involved in the game’s control system. You can rotate the camera to give you the best view of the action using the triangle, circle, x and square buttons, which you’ll find to be necessary when faced with a narrow path to cross or when needing a better view of the stage. The developers initially had plans to use a tilt-sensor that would allow you to tilt the handheld in order to tilt the game world. This, unfortunately, didn’t make it into the game. While this wouldn’t have changed the game significantly, tilt control would have given it that extra something to set it apart from other games.
Graphically Mercury looks rather nice, albeit simple, but for a puzzler it isn’t too shabby. The Mercury, being the focus of the game, looks excellent, and is very believable as it rolls around the stages, deforming as it makes contact with the environments. Environmental reflections would have been the icing on the cake, but this is something I can live without. Stages are simple, but solid looking and are perfectly adequate for this type of game. On the audio front the game has some pleasant tracks for you to listen to, but audio isn’t the game’s strong point.
Mercury is a very solid, original idea for a puzzler and, for the most part, is an excellent game. Unfortunately the good ideas are let down by an overly steep difficulty curve that will alienate many gamers, finding the early levels too difficult and being left with no other stages to play through. If you do stick with it then there is plenty of challenge for your money, with 72 stages to complete as well as aiming to get the top score for each. If you’re a patient person, willing to spend lots of time repeating your actions until you get it right, then I would definitely give Mercury a try, but it’ll probably end up being remembered as an interesting idea that was simply too difficult for most people to enjoy.
