ranzware
I’m sorry to announce that I am yet again going to speak highly of a game about going up and down hills, real quickly like. Haste: Broken Worlds, from Clustertruck and Totally Accurate Battlegrounds devs Landfall, is very much about the haste first and the broken worlds second, sending you hurtling across the inclines of its cartoon gauntlets at what Chris Morris would call terrifying legspeeds.
As per Tribes/Tiny Wings convention, Haste is a game of momentum, where you’ll need to build up speed on downwards slopes before launching yourself off the rises. Spend too long off the ground, though, and all that meddlesome air friction will slow you right down, thus encouraging a satisfyingly rapid-yet-graceful series of up-down manoeuvres. Like a dolphin, who’s really good at Exo One.
While you don’t do much except run forwards in Haste, it is keen to put up more of a challenge than just finding the perfect racing line. Randomised obstacles range from simple trees and spiked vines to giant lasers, rising lava pools that obscure all but a precious few slopes, and eventually, the rocket barrages of a hefty robot you defeat by faceplanting into at 120kph.
Dodging all these while keeping your pace up does engage a sufficiently diverse selection of brain parts to feel worthwhile and satisfying, and fatigue is rarely an issue as each level takes less than a minute to clear. In between, you can select your next dash from a branching map, with occasional stops to refill your health or buy sprint-assisting gadgets using collected crystals.
Hang on a tic. Branching paths? Run-specific upgrades? Why, this is Hades in unusually aerodynamic parachute pants, which I guess also means we’re Wishlisting a roguelike for about the fiftieth time this week. Sorry for that as well. Except, again, Haste doesn’t really care about making you repeat yourself into finally achieving one ultimate, golden run. Upgrades are nice and all, but deep down it’s still a test of speed, not builds – and with some effective application of the ‘glide downwards’ key, there’s an awful lot of speed to be had.
At its best, Haste is thrillingly kinetic, repeatedly spiking you with the rush of near-missing deathtraps at Mach 1. Even the soundtrack eggs you on, its pounding electronica slowing down as you do; biff a landing or misjudge an obstacle and it starts to sound almost panicked in its haggardness, as if the music itself is begging you to spin back up the giant hamster wheel that powers its continued existence.
Not everything is conducive to that delicious sense of forward velocity. One of the special stages merely has you painting the colour back into a monochrome island by running around it in circles, an incongruous non-challenge given the exceedingly generous time limit. As a longtime connoisseur of go-fast hill sliding games, however, I can say that for the most part, Haste: Broken Worlds is exactly my speed. You can see if it’s yours as well with the Steam demo.
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Kurt Indovina
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