Difficulty
One of the major criticisms of the first game was the difficulty slope that players faced. The progression was very linear, and as such, being stuck on a level means you could not progress any further, prompting some players to give up on completion. To rectify this, the progression system has been tweaked. All stages in a lab are now accessible when the lab is unlocked, meaning players can decide to try another stage to progress.
The time limit has also been scrapped from the game, but a set amount of time still remains, and has to be beaten to stand a chance of earning the top score on that stage. When the time has run out, the clock face turns into a sad face, yet the player can still carry on with the task at hand.
Also, mercury limits are mostly scrapped from the game also, however 100% mercury is now one of the requirements to progress to the later stages of the game. Limits only apply when at least one weighted switch is present in the level, and disappear when the weighted switch(s) are activated.
The stages are designed to be as difficult, if not more difficult than the first game, which provide gamers who managed to get far in the first game, with a decent challenge.
Read more about this topic: Mercury Meltdown
Famous quotes containing the word difficulty:
“I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.”
—Nora Ephron (b. 1941)
“So far as my experience goes, travelers generally exaggerate the difficulties of the way. Like most evil, the difficulty is imaginary; for what’s the hurry?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To treat a “big” subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening’s traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)