Warp Shift Review

Warp Shift is a free Google Play and Apple Store game released by Deep Silver (yes, the creators of franchises such as Saints Row and Dead Island). This app is certainly not what I would expect from a company whose most famous game involves beating up police and gangsters with an array of wacky weapons. This surprisingly casual puzzle “experience” from Deep Silver keeps a focus on graphical detail and ambient sounds, with fairly easy gameplay until much later levels. This game is sold as an “audio-visual voyage through time and space” i.e. another one of those games that isn’t meant to be a game, and quite frankly this new “genre” of games is dying quickly in my opinion.

Warp Shift stars a little girl and what seems to be a robot trying to build up some sort of pillar. To be honest, I had to do research on the game to understand why the girl is completing all of these puzzles. It turns out that the girl is actually trapped, and the robot is not able to do much of anything by itself. According to the game’s website, you aren’t building a pillar but escaping from some sort of ancient chambers. The gameplay itself consists of sliding sets of boxes around the screen, trying to line them up in a way that the girl can glide through to the exit of each level. The games “mind-boggling features” include swiping, and tapping! Amazing! We’ve never seen this stuff before, right? If you were hoping for anything besides swiping boxes around, you should probably look for another game.

As for the game’s art style, I hope you enjoy the color blue. While there are variations in the chambers, every single one is blue, so is the robot, so is the pillar, and so is a majority of the background scenery. While the boxes and character look nice, they aren’t amazing, nor do they warrant a game that seems to revolve more around “experience” than gameplay. If you want to take a look at game art that is an experience on it’s own, check out Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery. The ambient music is very soothing, and I do believe the game did a great job in regards to sound design. If the graphics and presentation of this game matched that of it’s music, I believe the people over at Deep Silver would be onto something.

Warp Shift is a game that had bold fantasies of being a whimsical experience and memorable adventure. While the groundwork is certainly there, this games mechanics are no different than the hundreds of average time-wasters available via the App Store. Not to mention the annoying pop-up ads that destroy any remnants of immersion this game would offer (the ads cannot be disabled, not even through in-app purchases). While the game was interesting to explore at first, the game quickly shifted to the mundane repetition of sliding around boxes a couple of dozen times until you reach the end. The story is promising, the sound design is awe-inspiring, but the game itself is simply too boring and repetitive.