Mercury Meltdown Revolution Review

The Wii seems to work well with tilting table games because of the intuitive nature of tilting the Wii Remote. Ignition has taken all the great elements incorporated in games like Marble Madness a step further by using a viscous liquid blob to navigate through traps. The tilting table corresponds well with the Wii Remote and the table designs are creative and fun, but there is no online functionality nor is there any multiplayer game modes.

Mercury Meltdown Revolution is a game that fits perfectly with the Wii Remote control scheme. By simply holding the Wii Remote in both hands in a traditional sense you simply tilt the controller and the board will follow suit allowing your mercury blob to slide in the sloping direction. It was a bit difficult to get used to rotating the camera by pressing the “-” button, but when has pushing that button ever been easy. Besides that, the controls are relatively easy and you feel like you’re actually in full control of the board using gravity to navigate your blob around traps, down ramps and through doors.

The overall goal of each level is to navigate your blob through a series of traps to get to the checkered square. The level design is what you’d expect in a game of this nature. There are plenty of walls and obstacles that will split your mercury into smaller halves. The idea is to remain intact, but you can maneuver the smaller pieces to meld back into the larger piece if you play the table right. There is a time limit meter that doles out larger bonuses for finishing with a smiley face, but if the face turns sour, you can still finish the level, but without those critical bonus points.
Getting to the end is fairly easy at first, but as you progress you’ll learn that there’s more to tilting the table. You’ll come across color coded doors that you must maneuver your blob through, but you’ll have to roll through paint first to match the color. We found this to be easy in some instances, but sometimes we found it difficult to perfectly match the color of the door. For instance, you may come across a fuchsia colored door and you’ll have to rack your brain on how to do that by rolling through three colors of paint. Overall, it’s a unique idea that pays off once you master the color wheel, but it may frustrate you in the beginning. The developers have also used the mercury idea by incorporating temperature. A cooler blob will roll faster while a warmer blob will sludge around the board. Again, it’s a nice use of the mercury concept that adds an element of challenge to the gameplay.

It would have been nice to have a multiplayer element in the game, but sadly it isn’t included. There’s also a lack of online functionality, which is forgivable, but it would have been nice to at least have a leaderboard to see how you’re doing compared to your friends or other players.
Mercury Meltdown Revolution is a fun game for those who are into the Marble Madness type puzzle game. The addition of temperature and the color wheel puzzles add a unique element to the series and add dimension to a game that would otherwise amount to a Marble Madness clone. The puzzles get quite frustrating as you progress to later levels, but that only makes the game more rewarding if you complete them.

— J. Thomas