Remember at school when the science teacher got the little blobs of mercury out in an attempt to amaze the class with this metal that was actually in liquid form? Remember how it moved around the tray in a wibbly wobbly way, occasionally splitting into separate little blobs? Well, now you can send little blobs of mercury wobbling around, but on a more interesting tray.
Mercury is essentially a Marble Madness / Super Monkey Ball hybrid but made to look a lot prettier. The aim is to tilt the tray and carefully guide your mercury blob from the starting point, around a maze of obstacles, to the finishing point. Along the way some of the mercury could fall off the edge into oblivion or you might have a time limit to work to. Obstacles to help / hinder your progression include moving platforms, narrow ledges, mercury eating creatures, teleporters, blob splitters, locked doors, vacuum pumps, rams, gears, and various other typical puzzle elements that have been used in other puzzle games previously. Also, you sometimes need to change the colour of your blob to be able to activate a particular door or finishing post. There are colour-changing stations but sometimes you may need up to four different colours on a maze and therefore need to split your mercury into separate blobs. This starts to get tricky, controlling one blob whilst keeping an eye on the other blobs because if you loose too much mercury over the edge it's game over.
The thing that anyone who plays this game will be amazed at is the animation of the blobs of mercury. They look simply amazing and behave exactly as mercury does. Whoever programmed the physics of movement for mercury blobs in this game deserves a medal. The rest of the game looks great as well. The mazes are bright, clear and easy to rotate around for a better view. The only area that isn't quite perfect is that the maze can sometimes automatically zoom out a long way making it quite difficult to see clearly. You can zoom back in but only at the expense of not being able to see all of your blobs.
The sound is fairly basic. There are unique tunes for every single maze but if I'm honest I didn't pay much attention to them. The rest of the sound effects do a good enough job but are nothing special, just beeps and whooshes and the like.
Now, this is a puzzle game and puzzle games are supposed to be addictive. Well, this one is fairly addictive, but not to the same level as say Lumines, Tetris or any other game that has you completely hooked right from the start. There are not enough different modes of play to keep people interested. In fact there's just one really. They have tried to make it sound like there are various different modes but they are all pretty much the same. It should keep people going for a little while with its 72 puzzles, and you can always replay levels to try and get a better score, but I don't think it will last long after that.
To sum it all up then, it's a really good game that looks fantastic and should last a while, but is not quite as addictive as it could have been.
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