review
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POSTED 30/9/11


MERCURY HG

UTV Ignition
Xbox 360/XBLA (also on PS3/PSN)

“My mercury’s in retrograde”. We’ve NFI what Bloc Party were on about there, but this game features mercury and that song was about it, so another questionably relevant introductory paragraph sinks slowly into the west.

The game? Menu-wise, Mercury Hg could be mistaken for Breaking Bad: The Game. It’s all periodical tabley, but there’s no Walter or bitch-face Skylar, Los Pollos Hermanos is but a random trio of Spanish palabras and there’s certainly no creepy Giancarlo Esposito exposition.

Instead, it’s kinda Marble Madness meets Super Monkey Ball. Or perhaps Blobble Madness meets Super Monkey Blob, as your marble/ball is a fluidesque poisonous silver lump. There’s also some de Blobby colour theory, although we’re fucked if we know how green and red make yellow. Anyway, the bonus is there’re no frickin’ apes, monkeys, gibbons (funky or otherwise), mandrills, orang-utans or other creepy simian creatures. The difference is that you tilt the board upon which your globule’s globified, rather than the glob itself, and that you can lose globby percentage if too gung-ho when cornering.

60 levels of gradually more angst-inciting viscous-blobtasticness are where it’s at (whether you’ve two turntables and a microphone or not), as you splorb around collecting bonuses, going colour-swaptational and assailing sticky, splitty, sliding, rotating and more other types of squares than you’d disinter at a right-angles-rule convention.

Options abound, with timed challenges, bonus stages, ghosts to beat, online score-whore nirvana and more. Plus it’s all rather nattily super-flying-fun-HD graphicamatically. You can play to your own music, although whenever we tried the game soon stuttered to near halt. BA-BOWR.

It’s yay to go all Marble Madness-inspired physics puzzler. But when it was accomplished infinitely more fungasmically 27 years ago, you must take time to ponder...

Tick. Think. Tick. Think.

Hmm, perhaps Mercury Hg needed to be more retrograde?

take me back to the start...

 



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ALL WRITTEN CONTENT COPYRIGHT © AMY FLOWER 2008-2018. GAME IMAGES COURTESY OF RESPECTIVE GAMES COMPANIES.