Mercury Meltdown (Post-E3 2006)

Once in awhile a game comes out of nowhere and just instantly hooks player with addictive gameplay, unique design and an undeniable fun factor. One such game should soon be landing on Sony’s PSP in the form of Ignition Entertainment’s Mercury Meltdown. Mercury Meltdown is the newest incarnation of Mercury and promises a lot of new challenges and a ton of stages for players to guide gloopy globs of mercury through in what can arguably be called one of the most addicting experiences available on the PSP.

Mercury Meltdown has been enhanced in several ways. To begin with, you now have over 160 stages to play through in the single player mode alone. Add multiplayer party games and unlockable labs to the mix and you’ve got even more wholesome goodness to take in. The difficulty has been spread out more in this game to allow people of varying skill levels to enjoy the title. While the levels are still timed, you no longer have to feel so pressured by the clock as you can finish a stage even if time has expired. However, those who finish within the allotted time will receive bonus points for their achievements.

The various labs in Mercury Meltdown have been cleverly designed and have varying themes. Whether you’re getting soaked in the Hydro Lab or spacing out in the Astro Lab, you’ll find unique puzzles to solve and challenges to overcome. Some stages require you to split your mercury blob into several pieces and change color as before, but now a color chart has been added to the HUD to help you mix the RGB components of your blob to get the color you need. This is a small, but noticeable change as you can now quickly glance to the corner of the screen to decide which colors you should blend.

The PSP library is pretty a dark abyss of mediocre titles and generally weak games, but luckily Ignition has been hard at work on this game ensuring that you’ll have something to keep the pretty PSP screen lit up for hours on end. The game is currently scheduled to hit store shelves later this year around September. Given the addictive qualities and upgraded visuals, Mercury Meltdown is definitely one of the best games in the PSP pipeline. We’ll have more on the game near release, so be sure to keep an eye out for this one.