PhraseShift
More cross words than crossword
$1.99 Developer Hyper Hippo Productions, hyperhippo.ca Platform Universal Requirements iOS 6 or later
For those that love them, words can be a truly joyful playground. Whether that’s a hard-fought game of Scrabble in which you manage to land “quixotic” just right across a triple-word multiplier, or cramming a crossword together so that your most audacious guess fits, word games are addictive.
Phrase Shift tries to leverage this vowel-mangling obsession; essentially, it’s a crossword puzzle with just one clue. Each puzzle provides you with a set of words, which act as both clue and answer. You slide these words so that letters line up in a column to form the correct solution. “Freezing cold water?” Time to line up the I, C, and E. Next.
And that’s it. While there are 120 puzzles on offer (split evenly across three difficulty levels – plus an additional one per day), they’re all in exactly the same format. How about more complex puzzles that challenge you to solve multiple clues at once? Alas not. When you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.
Also – although we’ll admit this is an issue with crosswords in general – the nature of these puzzles is you’ll either get the clue near-instantly, or just be left scratching your head through hint after hint. Your brain is on the same wavelength as whoever wrote that puzzle, or you’re out of luck. With a half-decent vocabulary, though, you’re likely to burn through the whole game in less than two hours.
the bottom line. An overly simple word puzzle game that will fail to satisfy most crossword fans.