Archer Maclean's Mercury

"The gameplay just doesn’t understand what makes a great puzzle game great"

Mercury was a puzzle game released early on in the PSP's life. Though certainly quite original, it was not that great a game…time to find out why

The basic idea is that you have blob of mercury that you can shift around by tilting the platforms underneath it. The obvious thing this leads to is moving a massive blob of mercury across a thin platform trying your hardest not to lose some over the side – which can sometimes be harder than it sounds. You also have to worry about machinery such as teleporters that move you from one place to another, lasers that you can activate to open doors and bridges where you must sacrifice mercury to push them down. To make things better there's also enemies to worry about from hungry little things that chase you down eating away at your mercury to tesla coils that electrocute away the mercury. All this adds up to pretty good races through levels as well as attempts to get through levels without losing to much mercury, however there's one other thing to mention…

…You see the really original bit about all this is the colour system. Normally you'll start a level with silver mercury (though this changes in later levels). However using paintshops you can change the mercury to one of 6 different colours which allow you to activate colour coded switches and move through colour specific filters. This helps create some rather good level designs and that's before we even begin with the ability to split mercury in to multiple pieces for quite a few different purposes.

And yet all this…I'm not sure it really matters. You see I've played a good number of puzzle games in my time and what I've realised are the best ones are incredibly addictive and almost endlessly replayable…and neither of these features are present in Mercury. The game never brings you back to it - Instead you force yourself to play another few levels. And the game is also incredibly short – only 5 hours or so until you finish it.

The graphics are good. The levels have a lovely industrial feel that looks quite sleek – though it's far from amazing. The backgrounds are alright, but the great thing about the graphics is the mercury. The lighting on it, the movement and the physics – VERY nice. The music is almost non-existant which is a big minus. The sounds are all nice and industrial but certainly don't make up for the tiny amounts of music.

This game really isn't worth bothering with – The gameplay just doesn't understand what makes a great puzzle game great whilst the music plays pathetically rarely.

Gameplay = 5.0/10
Graphics = 7.0/10
Music/Sound = 2.5/10

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 07/02/08

Game Release: Archer Maclean's Mercury (EU, 09/01/05)