Recent reviews by Tylup

It's great, it continues getting better, and there's nothing else like it. Find a guild you fit into and you'll do just fine.

I bought this many years back, but only played it about an hour at the time. I'm disappointed I let it gather digital dust in my library for so long, because it's probably the best puzzle game I've ever played. Very immersive despite the abstract graphics. The mechanics are easy to grasp, yet each puzzle requires a bit of thought, and sometimes unconventional thinking, to figure out how to proceed. I highly recommend playing through this.

140 has intuitive rhythm mechanics with the great concept of slowly adding layers/evolving a song as you play each stage. It has great sound design, with just the right amount of rhythm to find the right timing for jumps, etc. without feeling too busy musically. Its visuals are simple, but appealing: Each time you collect a capsule to reveal a new rhythm mechanic, the capsule changes the color palette and keeps things fresh. The timings are a little tough in spots, but frequent checkpoints make clearing the stages an easy matter of trial and error. However, clearing the first three stages ("beating the game", as you may) unlocks the first of the mirror stages, where you can play through the stages again, but visually reversed and with no checkpoints. Mistiming on the normal stages is jolting, but relatively harmless. Mistime any one jump on the mirror stages and, well, you'll have to restart the whole stage.

Its systems are straightforward and easy to get the hang of, but pushed nearly to their limits. Collect items, go places, do things, and find a happy (or not) ending usually within 10 minutes or less per ending. Level design is simple but very clever. Pick up items to help you reach certain places, but over-encumber yourself and you'll struggle to traverse the land.. It's a well-polished world, balanced well to make you pick your items carefully for most of the endings, while still being fun to traverse. The art is simplistic, but charming and clear.

My only complaint is that none of the endings are as convoluted as the game's mechanics allow. For instance, you can't drop items, but a certain place allows you to discard everything on you. That has the potential for some tricky endings where you would need to get specific items, use them to gain access to somewhere, discard them, and finally get one or two other items to enable that ending. I can understand not making the base 100 endings this convoluted, though, because that might be more frustrating to carry out than it is fun or rewarding to complete. Perhaps something extra elaborate like that could be added as an optional post-game ending to achieve.

Great story, nice characters, and a very unique experience! I enjoyed the whole journey.

This game is outstanding, and doesn't deserve the vast majority of the negative reviews it's received. People are either too impatient to wait for 3 minutes of initialization on first launch or otherwise don't make complaints and negatively review because they think the game is unpopular.

• The campaign is great. It has substance to it, though there's a ton of room for further detail in the universe. There are a handful of interesting characters, and others that aren't so much. The setting, story, and antagonist are enjoyable. Side missions give you plenty to do to unlock attachments and equipment. The campaign's primary weaknesses are relatively uninteresting hostile targets. Also the AI isn't great; they have pretty dead-on aim, which makes the toughest difficulties very tough.
  
  
• The sheer volume of multiplayer unlockable content is impressive, but achieveable. Between all the different kinds of emblems, calling cards, weapon camos and accessories, weapon variants, scorestreak variants, rig camos, gestures, and taunts that are unlockable, you've got hundreds of unique unlocks to earn through mission teams, the Quartermaster, and player and weapon prestige levels. At a rate of 2-4 keys per match (depending on personal performance), and a cost of 10/30 keys for common/rare supply drops, you can customize your profile and playstyle with a pretty sustained flow of content.
  
  
• The weapons are balanced and diverse. Just about every gun is good in its own situations (hip-fire or ADS? Fast damage for single targets or larger clip size for sustained fights?). Weapon variants add even more variety to this by adding on extra perks to the weapon, ranging from simple things like recoil reduction or magazine size to entire weapon overhauls. You can get variants that turn a pump-action shotgun to single-slug short-range sniper style, or a pistol to fire wide spread blasts or to unload half its 14-round clip each trigger pull. Over all, combat has stayed fresh and enjoyable after hundreds of hours of game play, and there are still a lot of guns I have yet to really delve into.
  
  
• The maps are varied and interesting, with a good balance between long distance and close quarters areas in all the maps. There are not many places that can be fortified, and none easily, which helps to cut down on camping. Wall running, sliding, and the short-range jetpack make combat very active.
  
  
• Rigs are great. They add an extra element of customization, allowing you to use one Payload ability and one perk, from three total for each rig. They range from super-powered guns to time rewinders to active camo, and each one feels impactful to use.
  
  
• The zombies game mode is very extensive and well-made. Tons of secrets and content in the first map alone, with plenty more beyond. It has a bit of a learning curve, but once you get familiar with the park and where to find stuff it gets even more fun.

• Multiplayer has iffy pre-game network handling. I frequently get kicked out of pre-game lobbies ("Could not establish secure connection to host"/"Failed to migrate host"/etc.), which is so prevalent because my internet connection is a 4G cell phone hotspot in a 1-2 bar signal area. However, most people run into this problem every now and then, so it's an issue of programming and not just my circumstances.
  
  
• Cheating is an issue in multiplayer. Since matches are entirely peer-to-peer, there's no way to implement anti-cheat. People do actually get banned when people send recordings of the hackers to Infinity Ward directly, but probably once every day or two I play I'll run into someone cheating to get an edge.
  
  
• Certain weapons show up in multiplayer more than others. The Reaver is popular due to its ease of use and mistake-forgiving semi-automatic nature. The M.2187, a brand new shotgun with the ability to get an akimbo attachment, is also very popular because, in the right hands and with Akimbo, it can easily secure kills at short to medium range. Even with some level of disparity, you tend to run into all the weapons regularly. The only weapons I rarely see are some of the classic weapons, which can only be unlocked once per two player prestige levels.
  
  
• The player base is pretty small. My personal opinion is that this is largely due to the fact that many people struggled to get past performance issues caused by Infinity Ward's lack of QA on release and (justifiably) reviewed the game negatively, which has driven away potential buyers. And with past titles remaining popular, as well as Modern Warfare Remastered releasing concurrently with IW, the CoD player base is divided. Current state of the game doesn't warrant the overall rating of mostly negative, but that's what you get for releasing a AAA game before you've finished getting the wrinkles out. The game's systems and mechanics are, at this pointin my opinion, more robust and interesting than the last two CoD titles (most of the previous games, really).

This game is challenging and fun to pick up for a couple hours once in a while.

It's good.