Haste: Broken Worlds Review (PC): I Just Felt Like Running

Sometimes, all a video game needs is a good feel in its gameplay. For me, you can leave behind a deep, engaging story or complex mechanics in titles if the core gameplay is outstanding enough. That’s the case with Landfall Games’ latest, Haste: Broken Worlds, a game built on momentum and speed. There may not be much to pull you in beyond its idea of outrunning the end of the world, but that is good enough to make it worth recommending.

Seeking a portal for the end of the world

In Haste: Broken Worlds, you play as Zoe, a girl who is outrunning the fracturing of all time and space. Every level in the game revolves around you moving through a procedurally-generated course filled with obstacles and hills. Don’t take too much damage or fall into the abyss, and you will reach a portal that let’s you continue on the game’s roguelite pathways of runs. Make it to the end of that path to face a boss and continue the story.

As mentioned above, speed and momentum are the name of the game. While running through levels, you will want to control your descent in the air to line yourself up to hit slopes in stride. On a base level, it sounds kind of like those old mobile games where you would ride a 2D motorbike and you had to line up the angle of your vehicle with the hill for the best times. Think of that, but it’s 3D, and much, much faster with tons of obstacles thrown in your path.

Running in Haste feels dang near perfect. Zoe has a lot of speed, and launching yourself off hills and soaring through the air is a feeling in gaming that I want more of. Running and then leaping through the air feels like a combination of Sonic the Hedgehog blistering through courses on the ground and the Insomniac version of Spider-Man doing his twists and flips through the sky while web-slinging. It just feels great all around. If nothing else, running with Zoe is satisfying from start to end.

Of course, not everyone is going to be able to make perfect determinations on their progress through a procedurally-generated level. With that in mind, you can use your energy bar to utilize one of four abilities. You start with Zoe’s board, which is meant to give you more hang time in the air, but my personal favorite was the grapple hook. Using this, you can correct yourself when you might make a wrong turn or not have the height or speed to get past a gap. Slinging myself around felt much more rewarding and was something I enjoyed doing much more over the other abilities.

My personal favorite levels were any time the game generated a set of trains on a rail. While running on these, you constantly are collecting sparks while having to avoid the trains you pass. The tracks are lined with speed boost rings, so it’s full high speed action that requires your best reflexes to get the most out of it as possible. I found it to be the most exhilarating part of the game, but there were many kinds of different obstacles that I enjoyed.

The three robots of the apocalypse

In total there are 10 shards in Haste: Broken Worlds, each ending in a boss fight. The first nine runs are all a mix of three bosses, just with differing difficulties. The first couple of shards I was really enjoying these boss fights, as they bring a different take to the game. Avoiding all kinds of danger in high speed combat as you land that blow on them was rewarding, but man, do these fights get difficult. The tension gets turned up as well when you consider you have at most three lives to defeat that boss. Fail, and you have to work your way through the entire shard again for another chance.

While difficult and sometimes quite stressful, the Jumper and Convoy bosses were enjoyable to me for the most part. The Jumper fires shots that burn away the land as you run towards it. You just need to avoid the incoming damage and hit the boss. My only problem with these fights is the wave attack sent at you. Because Zoe doesn’t have a jump button, there are times that attack felt unavoidable because I didn’t see it coming fast enough to run up a hill and avoid it. With all the beams and fire going around, it can be hard to focus on that.

The Convoy is a long vehicle that moves through the sand. You need to run behind it and move towards its front on the inside to hit its core. Lasers are everywhere in these fights, which had my adrenaline pumping. Even with this fight being more or less the same three times, I enjoyed it.

Finally, the other boss you see three times in Haste: Broken Worlds is the Snake, and this is easily the worst part of the game for me. Where the others are tough, they feel fair in how dealing damage to the boss is done. The Snake is constantly slithering all over the place and the only place where you can deal damage is the back of the head. You Might think it’s a simple case of running up the snakes back to its head, but because of the wave motions it takes, you will likely face plant into it, completely losing all momentum. This is on top of avoiding all the laser shots, missiles, explosions, and icebergs that are a constant assault on you. I hated these fights. Even when I won, it felt like it took forever because of how challenging it can be to land a hit on the back of the Snake’s head.

Just don’t slow down

As you make your way through Haste: Broken Worlds, nodes you can select in the pathway include a vendor area to get some upgrades for that run, a campfire to heal for the road ahead, some levels that are much more difficult, and question nodes, which can be either challenge levels or give you the choice of certain upgrades. This roguelite layout is very simple. In fact, I find it too simple to the point that I really had no interest in spending much time in these areas at all. The resting stops have story elements where Zoe chats with characters about the apocalypse they are in, but it never amounted to anything that made me want to stick around and pay attention to.

The story is handled in characters speaking through text and giving grunts. While I didn’t necessarily dislike any of the personalities, none of them stood out to me in a way to make me care about them. Even with Zoe, her story is handled so heavily with offscreen events. Apparently, she has been inadvertently traveling between worlds for years without her control. Because she was always hopping between places, she decided to become a courier that delivered things between worlds. That’s kind of interesting, but we are given all of that info through speech bubbles. It felt like the idea was for there to be a deep backstory here, but it just comes off flat in the delivery. The story isn’t bad, it’s just kind of there.

Final verdict

Haste: Broken Worlds is a game that thrives on its gameplay feel, even if there isn’t much outside of its main missions that might catch you. Zoe and the rest of the cast might not have caught my imagination from a story standpoint, but knowing I can return to this game at any time to get new procedurally generated levels is the highest selling point for this game. Listening to the music as you speed through courses with tons of obstacles thrown at you is a high octane rush that I wish I could get more of in video games.

Haste: Broken Worlds was reviewed on PC with a code provided by Landfall Games.