Archer Maclean's Mercury

"It's a 9 out of 10 if this is your kind of game, if not, then a 1 out of 10"

This game is Archer Maclean's Mercury. Designed by Awesome Studios in the UK, which I have never heard of. It looks like there are some other Archer Maclean games out there, but not for the PSP.

Anyway, in this game, you have six different levels, and each level has a number of stages you must complete before you can move on. Each stage is a puzzle where you have to move a blob of mercury from one end of the board to the other, but you have to complete various tasks in between. In order to complete the tasks, you have to move the blob quickly, and carefully. Some stages require you to finish them quickly, some require that you don't drop more than a certain percentage of the mercury blob. And you don't move the blob, you tilt the stage around the blob. It's simple when there's just one blob, but when you have multiple blob's it can get tricky. The controls are real simple, the analog nub tilts the stage, and square, triangle, circle, and X rotate the camera.

The graphics aren't too bad on this game. I felt the menu, and introduction screen looked a little amateurish for this. But the in-game graphics are what matters. The puzzle stages don't look bad at all. The blob of mercury looks pretty good. It rolls around, and splits up like how I imagine mercury would.

To be honest, I found this game pretty boring. The load times felt long, and each time I completed a stage, I felt more like I was doing a chore than playing a game. It's not that the game was designed bad, it's just that it wasn't really my type of game. I found that I would have to play the same stage several times to figure out how to beat it, and then I would have to try and actually control the mercury blob to do that. Like I said earlier, it gets hard controlling two or three of those blobs of mercury at the same time. I guess I just really don't enjoy playing the same stage over and over again, I like to beat stages within several tries, not many tries. If your into these kind of games, then I'm sure you would enjoy it, although I'm not too sure you'd enjoy re-playing the levels after you've beaten them. Some people like striving for the highest score, others don't. I rented this game and probably didn't play it for more than two hours, it just wasn't my kind of game.

Here's the breakdown of what I liked and what I didn't like about this mercury game.
Pros
*Mercury blob and levels looked good.
*No problems with the camera
Cons
*Loading times seemed just a bit long, but thats probably because I wasn't enjoying the game.
*Wasn't very fun to me, I guess I didn't like how I had to solve the puzzles. I didn't like re-trying stages over and over. First you have to figure out how to beat it, and then you have to do that, which is the harder part.

So, should you rent this or buy this? If you enjoy re-playing the same stage many times to beat it, and you like thinking games, then get this. I almost bought it, but instead I rented it, and I'm glad I did. I didn't realize that I'd have to play each stage so many times to get past it.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 04/20/05