Haste Is a Fun Auto-Running Roguelike

Hello everybody and welcome to another game review on Out of Games. This time around, we’re looking at something a bit new and unusual. Released this year on April 1st, but this isn’t any April Fools joke. It’s Haste, an auto-running roguelike. I was recommended this game by StormKnightSera, who you may have noticed hasn’t actually been part of the website for about 7 or 8 months now, but I’ve still kept in touch with her and spoken a fair bit.

Haste was made by a company called Landfall, a name that you might be familiar with if you've played Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, Clustertruck, or most recently, PEAK. Shall Haste be as much of a peak as that mountain climbing game however?

The Story Felt... Hastily Put Together

In Haste, you control Zoe, a courier who hops between worlds to deliver messages all over the… worlds. There’s not much explanation here, which leads me to the biggest negative of the entire game which I’m going to get through with at the very beginning. The story in this game is unnecessary and hamfisted. The plot tries to play with themes of one’s choice in their destiny and feelings of self-worth, but it only really starts picking up way too late. Because of this, the game has a lot of “plot dumping” towards the end.

By the time the game attempted to make anything out of its storyline, I found myself not caring about the story at all and just hopelessly mashing through dialogue boxes to get to where I wanted to go. The cast of characters are all pretty charming and colorful, but because the plot in the game is so insignificant, they serve less as characters and more as just vehicles to get certain gameplay mechanics rolling. I could tell that they were trying to get somewhere meaningful, but because the plot is so subordinate to the gameplay, it ends up being more of a set-dressing that’s constantly reminding you that it could’ve been bigger, but it just isn’t.

It's A Game Where You Make... Haste

Haste’s weird story problem however did not have any effect on my enjoyment of the game. Err, well it did a tiny bit, but this was very minor at most. Haste is a “gameplay-first” kind of game, which really could’ve been a “gameplay-only” type of game, but I digress. The way the game plays is the most important part of it, and this is where the positives of the game shine through.

As the name suggests, Haste is a game that’s all about going really fast. It’s an autorunner game that takes you through procedurally generated levels full of obstacles you need to avoid while gaining momentum and moving at blisteringly fast speeds. But you can’t just take everything slowly because the world is collapsing on itself, which basically means that if you’re not running fast enough, you will eventually fall behind and die. The game utilized inclinations in the terrain to help you build momentum by landing on the downwards side of a hill, which you can dive down at any time to help reach the optimal landing zones quicker. There’s no jump button in the game, which will throw you off for at least a minute or two, but it won’t take long before the system becomes ingrained into you.

On the default difficulty setting, the game will kick your ass a fair few times and you will have a pretty tough time. You however can fine-tune everything about the difficulty from how frequently objects spawn, how much items cost, to the timing window of Perfect landings. If you really want to, you can turn all of these settings all the way to have an invulnerable character, no obstacles to dodge, and the ability to buy every item for free, and get a Perfect landing almost every single time. I wouldn’t recommend that you actually play the game this way, but there are some achievements where doing this is borderline mandatory.

The actual gameplay of Haste is incredibly fun. Zoe controls quite nicely, and it’s very satisfying to weave your way in and out of obstacles and get Perfect landings on the other side due to the dive maneuver. You can also choose one of four items that you have access to at any time, and there’s a lot of items to buy and use, meaning that you’ll get a bunch of different styles of runs every time you play.

Hasting Your Own Way

Haste’s auto-runner gameplay style makes for a unique roguelike structure. There are ten different “shards” in the game, which is what the game refers to as the levels. Each shard consists of a randomly generated bottom-up map with several different “fragment” types. Blank ones are standard levels, campfires are resting spots where you can get health back, moneybags are shops where you can use the sparks you acquire to buy items. Question marks will take you to random events, which could just simply give you an item, or take you to a special challenge stage. Blank ones with spikes around them indicate “extra difficult” levels which are harder but give you a free item at the end. Lastly, each shard ends with a boss marked by a giant skull. In later shards, you’ll also find particle effects around the level fragments indicating some characteristic that alters the stages.

Your performance in each stage is also judged on a ranking system from E to S, which will provide a bonus to your spark count. The shard shops have a huge selection of different items with effects ranging from getting even more sparks, healing you, increasing your boost, and even forcing shoddy landings to count as Perfect. If you’ve played any roguelike game before, you know how the structure plays out. I’m not super familiar with the genre through other games, but it is quite fun to see how all of the different items make each run feel that much more distinct from each other.

There’s a lot of obstacles and fun gameplay sections that can be generated. My personal favorite ones are the roller coaster levels (no bias here) where you can run on top of the train tracks through boost rings.

The bosses however are a low point for the game. There are a total of three regular bosses throughout the game, and they each end up repeating each other. The bosses themselves are not bad, but it does become a bit boring needing to fight the same bosses again and again because they repeat across different shards, and they also become frustrating because of how much of a huge difficulty leap they take from the previous time you fought that boss. The final boss is unique for being different, but it’s the least boss-like of all of the bosses because there’s nothing you’re actually fighting except time.

Haste is a good game. Its biggest downside is that the story is pointless and it feels half-baked and haphazardly thrown in as an excuse to give the game a plot when it didn’t need one, but this ends up having no effect on the gameplay.

People always say that the actual gameplay is the most important part of any video game, and the ‘actual gameplay’ in this game is really good. It is incredibly hard on its default difficulty, but there is a lot of fun to be hard zipping through the stages intricately weaving your way around all of the obstacles.

As of right now, Haste is only buyable on Steam. Speaking of Steam, if you enjoyed this review, then be sure to check out our Steam Curator Page.