Challenging and addicitve
The mercury blob reacts, exactly as you’d imagine, to the environment and is used in many interesting ways, including activating pressure pads that open doors, jumping through tele-porters or moving and guiding other objects in the maze. There are also plenty of hazards that are designed to slow down your progress or make the journey trickier, such as sticky conveyor belts to slow the blob down, slippy conveyor belts to speed it up in an attempt to throw you off the edge and conveyor belts that move in different directions. There’s a wealth of well thought out ideas to ensure that each journey through the maze is a different experience , ensuring that you need to think carefully which route to take and forge out a plan to overcome the obstacles.
In many of the mazes you’ll find paint shops, some of which change your blob into one of the primary colours and others that allow you to choose between three different primary colours in order to create a secondary one, such as purple. Many of the pressure pads or doors that you need to open to progress into the next compartment of the maze are colour coded; so it’s a case of spraying your blob with the required colour to open the area. The game becomes more complicated when those colours represent the secondary colours because you’ll have to split the blob (by bumping into an object) and tilt the maze so that these two separate parts are sprayed in different colours. Once completed, you’ll then need to bring them together to create the new colour. For example: A door may be coloured in green, but you may only have access to a blue and red paint shop, so you need to split the ball into two and send one half to the blue paint shop and the other to the red one. Once you bring them back together you’ll have a green blob. Thankfully, there is a colour chart that sits in the top right hand corner of the screen indicating what mixes are required to make these certain colours. The levels become much trickier later on in the game and on occasions you’ll need to mix three colours in order to produce the right one.
The tricky puzzles and the accomplished hand to eye co-ordination needed to complete them don’t stop there, because a number of mazes have more than one finishing pad which need to be activated at exactly the same time to complete the level. So once again you’ll have to split the mercury blob and move them through the hazards, ramps, conveyor belts, tunnels and tele-porters in conjunction with each other in order to finish the level.
The camera controls work well and allow you to view the entire maze before you begin each level, allowing you to a plot a path and strategy for completing it in the shortest possible time. If you have more than one blob on screen you can switch the camera between them or pan out to view the map from a top-down approach.