In Haste, you gotta go fast

Haste: Broken Worlds takes the relaxing loop of sliding down and leaping off hills from iOS classic Tiny Wings and turns it into a thrilling, high-speed, and 3D roguelike.

In Haste, you play as Zoe, a girl who typically delivers letters but has found herself mysteriously transported to the new worlds you run through. When I say run, I mean it: Zoe cannons through the game.

Levels are filled with rolling hills, and your goal is to leap off the upslopes and land on the downslopes. The better your landings, the more you’ll increase your speed and build a boost meter that can be used for things like a burst forward or a grappling hook.

You’re incentivized to keep your speed up. The faster you complete a level, the higher grade you’ll get; higher grades give you better bonuses of things like “sparks,” which you can use to buy items.

Throughout the vibrant, procedurally generated levels, you’ll also have to avoid obstacles like rocks, giant Sarlacc-like pits, and machines that shoot lasers and bullets at you. If you crash into an object, you’ll lose health and slow down. If you’re too slow, a crackling, damaging energy will sneak up behind you. If you run out of health, you’ll lose a life. Lose all your lives, and your run will end.

There are some familiar roguelike mechanics in Haste, like a currency you can spend between runs to permanently improve things like your health and boost meters. During runs, you’ll also pick each stage on a map. Haste has a great map feature that lets you pick some or all of your route in advance so that you can play a series of levels without interruption. It really helps with the momentum.

When things are going well, it’s easy to reach an amazing flow state where you’re leaping from hills at breakneck speed, timing your landings and boosts, dodging obstacles in your path, and racing to the end of every level as fast as you can.

But at the end of each zone (technically a “shard”), there’s a large boss — like a giant flying snake — and they were often total buzzkills. The boss levels force you to run through more open-ended zones instead of just blasting forward, and the game just isn’t as fun and feels tougher in the open environments. Thankfully, you can change the game’s difficulty level.

The game’s storytelling messes up the flow, too. You’ll meet a bunch of characters, and while their personalities are fun and their character portraits are illustrated well, they often show up in lengthy, forced conversations between levels. For a game called Haste, there are a lot of long chats!

Those quibbles only detracted a little from how much I enjoyed Haste. At its best, Haste keeps you on the edge of your seat as you leap up and down from hills and careen through worlds. But when the game changes pace, it can be frustrating. I just want to go fast.

_{Haste: Broken Worlds is now available on PC.}