Sometimes you see something and build up an unrealistic expectation in your mind. That's the case with “Mercury Meltdown”, currently available in the Ovi Store. Having played the original games (Archer MacLean's Mercury” and the sequel “Mercury Meltdown”) in their original form on the Sony Playstation Portable, it's only natural that I thought I knew what to expect.
Perhaps I should have stopped and prepared myself, because this version of Mercury Meltdown is a poor imitation of a great game.
The game, as designed, is a variant of the “get your avatar/icon/car/marble” to the exit of a twisty maze. As befits this genre, you have different types of floor, some more slippy than other, some that are sticky, some that crumble once you cross them, and so on. The twist in Mercury Meltdown is that your representative in the game is a blob of liquid mercury.
Not only does this blob roll around the landscape, if even a little bit of it goes over the edge of the tile and hangs over empty space, then it will start to leak away to oblivion. You end up with a smaller blob of mercury – which might be a problem as you need to get a certain minimum percentage to the end of the level to successfully complete it.
Mercury Meltdown is a fascinating concept of a game, and it worked incredibly well on the Sony PSP – hence I jumped on this title when it appeared in the Ovi Store “new games” list. And, on first opening it, everything feels familiar. The splash screens, graphics and menu system are almost identical to the PSP, and while it's easy (for me) to see there are less levels, that's something I can live with.
Unfortunately, once you start playing the game, the experience takes a massive crash dive towards despair – actually that's a bit melodramatic, there is still a game here, it's just that the jarring jump from cartoon graphics to rather basic, block colour, top down graphics feels like more time was spent on the menu rather than the game engine. While some of the icons on the screen, such as the finishing gate, or tokens you can pick up along the way, look like they have had some effort put into them, the main playing area is flat and lifeless. It just kills any sort of immersion.
Originally, Mercury Meltdown was going to use tilt sensors on the PSP – given that it was never shipped with that technology, they went with using the analogue control stick instead. That gave a very fine control to the game, and it worked well. Now, your regular smartphone doesn't have an analogue stick, and while there are some smartphones that do have the accelerometers that could return the game to its original spec, they coders have gone with a basic cursor control, using either the d-pad or touching the screen above, below, left or right of your blob to move the mercury in that direction.
A note of caution in here: there are two versions of Mercury Meltdown in the Ovi Store - one is the "Lite" version which is a standard java port, and the second is the "S60" version which has some added extras to the code, but unfortunately doesn't completely sort out the control option. The big problem is that your inputs are digital in nature! You can't add in a little bit of left to your mostly up movement, you can only pressing one of the four cardinal directions. That's not the game that I was expecting, nor does it feel like the one advertised.
What you get and what is advertised seem to be at odds with each other.
Speaking of the game as advertised, compare those screenshots of the game (in the Store), with the screenshots of the game itself. Spot something amiss? Exactly. I thought the trick of using screenshots from one platform when advertised on a second platform went out of fashion with the Amiga/Atari ST wars. While it doesn't have a huge material impact here (thanks to this being a free title), it's not something that I want to see in the Ovi Store at all.
Yes, Mercury Meltdown is a let down after playing it on the PSP, but it's a let down in its own right. The presentation is poor, the controls hinder the game play rather than help it, and it feels like a cheap port to build on the good name of an existing franchise. I'm not sure I can recommend this.
-- Ewan Spence, May 2010.