Haste, by Swedish developer Landfall, caught my eye as soon as I saw a couple videos. Its easy to see why. Its really flashy, and it looks so satisfying. And it is, for the most part, but having played it for a few hours, its left me wishing it was more than it is.
The Good
The core of the game feels really good. The character movement is thrilling, controls are simple, and for the most part, you feel like you’re in control of your character. Jumping and landing perfectly on rolling hills one after the other is feels awesome.
I personally really like the character design too. They’re all very colorful, distinct, and the dialogue sprites are very pretty.
The Bad
The game feels like it needed some QA. The most noticeable thing for me, was buttons not being disabled while the animation that displayed them played. That is, an animation starts playing that fades to black, and afterwards fades to a menu. Just after the first fade to black, before the new menu has been revealed, you can already interact with the new buttons. This has led me to accidentally skip rewards a few times when I was pressing A to skip the animation(the first animation was skippable by pressing A, then the cursor is placed by default on the “decline” button, and pressing A does not skip the second animation, it activates the button).
The characters are… not that memorable, despite the good visual design. They don’t really do anything, or say anything interesting. They’re just there so you can get character upgrades, or unlock a new item.
Character upgrades are uninteresting, just numeric increases to your basic stats. Very common in roguelikes, but I really dislike it if they’re the only kind of upgrade available.
Procedurally generated levels. I feel like this game would have been infinitely better if it hadn’t been a procedurally generated roguelike, and instead had distinct hand crafted levels. Currently, they mostly blend into each other, not really having much to differentiate each other, except for the color of the hills and whatever obstacles get chosen to be generated in the level. This also results in some laughably easy levels right next to outright devilish ones, just down to a roll of the dice.
Procedurally generated also means a lot of the obstacles are not placed with any context in mind. Coin trails to death, boosters into a wall which instantly kills you, obstacles without sufficient slope to make it past them… It makes the game quite frustrating to play at times.
Overall
Despite the bad list being much longer than the good, I do think the core of the game is great, but everything else around it… make it a bit worse. Its a bad roguelike, it has a nonexistant story, uninteresting landscapes, and frustating procedural generation. It sometimes feels like they made a cool tech demo for character movement, and turned into a roguelike to try and get a few hours of gameplay out of it.
I find it hard to recommend, but if you like what you see in gameplays, by all means, give it a go. At its core, its a fun experience, just one that deserves a better game to support it.
