Mercury Hg is a Blast

For those of you who are not obsessed with killing Locust in Gears of War 3, you might be pleasantly surprised by an intriguing little puzzle action game that sneaked onto Xbox LIVE Arcade this past week. I’m talking about Mercury Hg, a clever game from UTV Ignition Entertainment that has had various versions over the past few years, all stemming from the original Archer Maclean’s Mercury released in 2005.

In Mercury Hg, you control a little blob of quicksilver that you must navigate from the start to the finish along the lines of Marble Madness. But here, you control the field of play by being able to tilt the pathway in any direction, thus causing the mercury to move. The pathway sometimes moves or narrows and you have to be careful how hard you tilt the playfield so you don’t drop your mercury blob off the side.
Other elements include Paint Shops that will paint your mercury blob a specific color so that it can go into color-coded territory or operate switches. Splitters will split your blob into two which will be necessary to complete certain levels. For instance, the finish square might be colored yellow meaning your mercury must be yellow to complete the level. But the level only has one red Paint Shop and one green Paint Shop. Split your mercury, paint one red and one green, then bring the blobs back together, and poof, they’re yellow!

There are 60 levels in Discovery Mode, and each level ramps up the gameplay one notch at a time providing a perfect pacing for an evening or two on the couch. Beating levels in Discovery Mode opens up Bonus Levels and Challenge Levels, where the difficulty increases. In Challenge Mode, you must complete a series of levels meeting certain targets; mess up once and you have to start the challenge all over, and yes, these can be difficult.

Mercury Hg is as challenging as you want it to be. You can just blow through the levels if you want, but each level has four targets to meet. There’s the target of finishing with your mercury blob intact (you can lose parts of your blob and still finish the level), a target of getting all the bonus pickups on a level, a par time target, and a target of just managing to finish. After each level, the leaderboards indicates your overall score and your fastest time which should spark some to say, “Oooh, I know I can knock off a tenth of a second here and move up the ladder.”
Two additional level download packs are planned for the near future. Oh, and did I say what may be the coolest aspect of this game? It’s only 400 Microsoft Points, about five dollars US. Try the demo; I bet you’ll be hooked.

import from:  http://forums.xbox.com/xbox_forums/b/community_blog/archive/2011/09/30/mercury-hg-is-a-blast.aspx