Haste review: Free as the wind, just don't look down

You’d be hard pressed to find three words that get me more interested in a game than “momentum-based platformer”. The feeling of blasting through an environment at ever-increasing speed as you hit every jump just right to launch yourself forwards is one of the most satisfying feelings in gaming – it single-handedly makes the existential disappointment of being a Sonic the Hedgehog fan worth it. 

Haste was an easy win for me then. Within minutes of starting the first stage, I was in the zone, charging through the place with that satisfying sensation washing over me.

In Haste, the world is falling to bits and you have to run away from it. You’ll dash at Mach speed through narrow 3D environments as the world disintegrates behind you. Every level’s terrain is designed to be as uneven and hilly as possible so you can continuously launch yourself into the air and land on slopes to increase your momentum. 

What I find most interesting is that you don’t have direct control of your jumps – they happen automatically as you run off a ramp – but you do have direct control of your falls. You have significantly more directional control in the air, and you can hold the “Fast Fall” button at any time to accelerate your descent, with the goal of landing on a downward slope at the perfect angle to increase your speed.

On top of this, a great variety of obstacles are put in your path for each level, including waves of explosives fired at you from a distance, old ruins and pillars that you can smack your face into, or just a big ol’ hole to fall down. Staying close to the ground and constantly getting perfect landings is the best way to speed up, which creates great moment-to-moment decision making: Do you take the big jumps and go high to avoid obstacles, or do you stay low and take the riskier path to move much quicker?

Haste’s timing system is a massive help in this regard. Rather than giving you a constantly ticking timer, Haste tells you how well you’re doing by showing you what grade you’ll get at the end of the level based on your current pace. This is a fantastic way of doing it as it’s so much easier to understand at a glance, and it creates brilliant moments. When you make an early mistake and see your projected grade drop to an E, it’s an amazing feeling to lock in and drag it back up to an S by the time you reach the end.

The campaign sees you navigate through Shards that lay out levels, item shops, and rest-stops in a roguelike style – similar to Slay the Spire’s map system – and you have to get through the Shard and defeat the boss at the end without running out of lives, with the items you can buy along the way increasing your health, speed, and giving you special abilities like vertical boosts. It makes getting through a Shard easy, too, as you can plan your entire route out as far in advance as you want, letting you jump instantly from one level to the next without having to return to the menu.

While this is a fun mode, I can’t help but feel like I’d rather have had a shorter campaign with hand-crafted levels, with these procedurally generated levels saved for the game’s endless mode. This feels especially true for the bosses, as across the game’s ten Shards, there are only four different bosses, three of which you battle three times, each version growing in strength. These bosses are fun concepts that force you to master the game’s systems, like a massive convoy you need to get inside and navigate to the front of, or a big snake monster that weaves around the level, but I was hoping for a bit more variety.

The story is perfectly fine. Nothing special, but it’s nice that it’s there to give everything a sense of direction and purpose. I don’t really care why the world is falling apart, I’m just here to go fast, but the characters are quite charming in the small conversations you occasionally get between levels, and it gives you an end goal that stops the campaign’s six-hour runtime from dragging.

So I leave Haste having got exactly what I wanted from it, no more, no less. Its momentum-based platforming mechanics are great fun that tap into that sense of satisfaction I love from the genre. While it could’ve done with a bit more variety in terms of boss and level design, the core gameplay is so much fun that I struggled to put it down, and I’m sure the endless mode will keep me hooked for quite a while.