:Shift!2: Review

The Shift! series is awesome. If you played the first Shift! game on the iPhone, or even the Flash game classic, you know that Armor Games could really do no wrong in creating a sequel. There are things that they could improve upon, but if you are just looking for quick confirmation of awesomeness, you've got it.

The basic idea of Shift!2 is to maneuver your heroine from the starting point of the screen to the door with by using any means necessary. Like any other platformer, Shift utilizes running, jumping, avoiding spikes, and key gathering to complete each mission, but the real twist is that you can completely change the aspect of the game. The entire game is set in black and white, with the white being the primary color you're in and the black being the objects in the way. In a normal game you would just have to find your way around or over the black, but in Shift you just hit the 'Shift' button and your perspective flips over to the white space.

Shift!2 makes things even more perilous by adding blocks that automatically shift you in 90 degree angles, and of course requires you to think in four directions on many levels to get to the end. The whole experience gets pretty difficult to manage after a good deal of levels, but I surprisingly kept plugging away and beating them. With 100 levels to trudge through, you'll have more Shift on your hands then ever imagined... and that is a good thing.

If I had to be picky (and I do), I would like to see one thing fixed. In some levels there is a gray area that you have to unlock to pass, but this gray area can be shifted into. Accidentally shifting into the gray puts you into some sort of purgatory though, not auto restarting the game but not letting you go on either. If you happen to have the sound on you'll catch the usual death sound, but I often play with people around, and the frantic techno track isn't so great for public places. All I ask is that the gray area be reworked to either be impermeable or to auto restart you when you do shift into it.

As far as iPhone gaming goes, you absolutely can't go wrong with Shift!2. It's fun to play, easy to pick up, hard to master, has great animation, quirky style, humorous level dialogue, and has enough levels to keep you entertained for a good deal of time. What more could you want from an iPhone game?