Join us as a shapeshifting cube on a journey through a simplistic world full of heavy techno music, deadly blocks and more static than your grandmothers CRT TV.

Sitting still as a cube or morphing into a circle when moving, our hero shape must traverse each level by ‘running’ (or rolling in our case) and jumping from platform to platform with a few twists here and there.

Each level has a sphere that must be activated with a small ball to make a portal to the next area, so your task in each stage is to find and retrieve this ball. Whilst on your journey to collect said ball, you’ll run into obstacles such as platforms that appear and disappear, shapes that become deadly when turned into static and blocks waiting to land on you from the sky. All of the enemy shapes and moving platforms play in time with the music, so if you keep an ear out you’ll hopefully get into the swing of things quite nicely without being too distracted by the retina-burning colours of the dancing shapes on screen.

As you progress through the levels you’ll be introduced to more gameplay mechanics such as bounce pads and even shifting gravity, but no single idea really gets fleshed out beyond a few uses.

The levels themselves really aren’t that interesting, the ideas are all sound but they just don’t seem to come together quite right. It’s a game with all the right ingredients that’s just missing that special something to bring them all together.

Levels aside though, the boss battles are very enjoyable and will have you blasting pulsating disco balls or gliding through a technicolour space avoiding certain death from flying triangles, it’s just a shame these boss battles are so infrequent.

With its big blocky shapes, conflicting colours and simplistic art style, 140 visually looks like a HD Atari game gone wild. Shapes in the background jump up and down in time to the music and platforms in the foreground appear and disappear with every beat. As you progress through the level, the backing track gets increasingly more complicated, much like in the Bit Trip. Series of games on WiiWare, which can be really satisfying when you’re a pro player - but that’s the problem, becoming good enough at this title to really enjoy the music is a hard task indeed.



With most music games it’s often the case that the track gets more layers as your progress and is pleasing to the ear and whilst the same applies here, the intensely steep difficulty curve will have you dying relentlessly and keeping the music at the same section for a very long time. It will often take so long to clear a particular section that you’ll be completely sick of the music currently playing and feel no sense of progression in the very slow layering of the tracks. The sheer brutality of the gameplay in this title stunts the flow of the game considerably.

The difficulty is one of this games biggest issues. It’s fine to build up to a hard-as-nails platformer, but this title is unforgiving from the very start which will be off-putting for many.

There is a reason for this insane difficulty though and that’s the content. This game is incredibly short, even for a music title. You should never really expect much more than a few hours from music games as they’re made with replayability in mind but you’d be lucky to stretch to an hours play-time on this title. What’s worse is that there isn't much reason to play this title more than once. Once you’ve become accustomed to the levels, you may want to play through it again to experience the music as it was intended without your constant deaths getting in the way, but with no score system or particularly interesting areas, it will be a short lived experience to return to.