A Little Undercooked: Haste Review

Well, I, for one, am extremely disappointed.

During the February 2025 Steam Next Fest, I covered a handful of different games, but Haste was among the few which really stood out to me. I loved the sense of speed, and momentum born from the game’s relatively simple mechanic of gliding down hills at the correct angle. It was very fun to play in an almost meditative way as you sunk into a flow state while zipping through its various levels.

What I wouldn’t know at the time, was that the demo showcased the most polished section of Haste. Unfortunately, the rest of the game doesn’t feel quite as polished by comparison. As such, the demo did a great job of highlighting what Haste could be with some more time in the oven.

Unfortunately, I can’t review speculative games.

What I can review is what Haste is: a game that’s incredibly fun, but lacking in polish. That’s a real shame because the folks at Landfall have the makings of something really special here. In fact, I think the only reason I’m even disappointed stems from how much fun I had while playing Haste when it actually worked. If it were somewhat middling, it’d be so much easier to write off Haste, and completely forget about it.

Developer(s): Landfall
Publisher(s): Landfall
Release Date: Apr 1st, 2025
Released on: Windows, Linux, macOS
Reviewed on: PC (Win)
Copy Purchased

Real quick before I continue: I know that originally the game was called Haste: Broken Worlds. The developer’s website still refers to the game this way, but the Steam page refers to it as both Haste, and Haste: Broken World. Also, all of the recent trailers flip between both names, so…I’m just going to call it Haste for the entire review.

Gotta Go Fast

We can start with the positives.

I still stand by what I originally said about Haste being extremely fun to play because it is. When it works. I don’t know what it is about moving fast, but that always generates a rush of dopamine in my caveman brain.

Then the music hits, and you’re transported to a completely different dimension. Nothing else exists – it’s just you, and the rolling hills as you quickly zip through each level.

Honestly, the whole package kind of reminds me of why I liked Sonic games so much when I was younger. To be clear, I don’t think Haste has much mechanically in common with those titles, but it shares that same blood pumping mix of great music, and fast-paced action. 

I don’t think it’s any deeper than that – I just love how Haste makes me feel, and how it feels to play.

Procedurally Generated Problems

So, what exactly are my problems with Haste if I love the core gameplay loop so much? In as few words as possible: everything else. I don’t think that it’d be unfair to say most of Haste feels haphazardly thrown together. It’s almost like the development team came up with a really strong core concept, but wasn’t entirely sure how they wanted to design supporting systems for it. For what it’s worth, that’s not something I can confirm – that’s just how it felt while playing the game.

The easiest example that I can point to for what I mean about Haste’s poorly considered ancillary elements are item pickups. Similar to other Roguelikes, Haste features a tiered item system, which affects how often you’ll see a particular item, and what kinds of effects it’ll have.

Normally, item rarity and the effect(s) of the item are linked. That is, the rarer an item is, the better the effect, and the higher its cost. This makes those rare items especially valuable, and very rewarding whenever a player finds them, or decides to purchase them over more common items.

However, Haste doesn’t mirror this typical implementation of items. Instead, several rarer items are strictly worse than common items. This is true in that they both cost more to buy, and have less favourable effects. For example, the rare item Speedy Recovery heals the player for 2 Health while they’re moving at 120 m/s, but the common item Aromatic Herb heals for the same amount without the stipulation of going fast. This begs the question: why would anyone take Speedy Recovery when Aromatic Herb does the same thing? This is doubly true when you consider that Aromatic Herb costs less, and activates more reliably because maintaining speeds above 110 m/s is incredibly difficult.

To be fair to Landfall, balancing is a huge pain in the butt. I spend a lot of time on fighting games, and those have a near endless stream of balance patches which make several tweaks to ensure every character feels fun to play as, or against.

However, the balance problems with some of the items in Haste make it feel as though this aspect of the game wasn’t given enough time to gestate. The example above feels very obviously out of tune, and is far from the only time where I noticed this sort of discrepancy. It just made items feel really poorly considered in the wider context of Haste as a whole.

I’m also confused by this map:

This is exactly the same system as what’s used in Slay the Spire for choosing your route forward. However, Slay the Spire has scripted events, and encounters that players can plan around, which makes choosing your route a strategic decision. For example, I usually try to avoid standard combat encounters, and prioritize Elites in Act 3 since I find the Elites a lot easier to build my deck around.

That begs the question: what strategic decisions am I making in Haste while choosing my route?

All of the levels are completely procedurally generated, so I have no idea what I’m going to run into. That makes choosing my path through a Shard (Haste’s name for each of its different worlds) feel largely superfluous. The only factors to consider are how often I’d like to visit a shop, or if I’m feeling bold enough to take on one of the challenge levels that are denoted by spikes.

Honestly, given how Haste works, I feel like I’d have had better if the game simply queued up 15 levels in a row, with a shopping break every 5. Having to make decisions about where to go next feels a lot like unnecessary busy work, and otherwise distracts from the moment-to-moment action that Haste excels at.

Heck, Haste even allows you to select your entire path through a Shard, so that you never have to see the map screen again during your run. To me, this almost feels like an acknowledgement that hopping from level to level without the map screen is the ideal way to enjoy the game.

Cycling back for a second, I wanted to touch on the use of procedurally generated levels. I didn’t mind that all of the demo levels were procedurally generated, but this makes the full game feel very repetitive. Were it not for the changing background scenery, I don’t know that I’d have even registered that I was making progress through the game’s different worlds because of how similar they look, and feel. Unfortunately, that sort of homogeneity is the consequence of letting an algorithm craft almost every inch of your game’s levels.

The reliance on procedural generation also means that there are several instances where levels have a bit of, for lack of a better word, jank. Some of my favourite examples of this include booster rings that shoot you directly into solid objects, hazards (like lasers) that are aimed off-stage, and sparks (the collectible currency) leading players into stationary obstacles or bottomless pits.

The Lack of Polish

I’d argue that the things I’ve already discussed feel like they lack polish, but I didn’t have a more intelligent way to categorize the remainder of what I wanted to bring up.

The first is that the game hitches quite a bit. I think the intention was for this to act as hitstop whenever the player collides with something so they can see what they did wrong, and adjust accordingly. However, the game appears to stop rendering for longer than your character is frozen (which is why I think there are performance hitches) so you can collide with additional obstacles while you’re not able to see, or respond to them.

My favourite instance of this happening was while fighting the Shard 7 boss wherein I accidentally collided with a laser, and was unceremoniously melted into a fine paste by additional lasers that hit me while I was looking at a solid pink screen.

In hindsight, that was kind of funny, but I found it fairly frustrating at the time. Doubly so since Haste is extraordinarily punitive, and makes players replay entire levels anytime they die.

There’s also been a few instances where I took damage from nothing. There won’t be anything on the screen, but things freeze, and my health goes down anyway. I have no way of knowing why this is happening, but it’s super frustrating, again, because Haste is very punitive with regard to its punishment for mistakes.

Also, the music stops playing sometimes for no reason, which is a shame since that’s one of the best parts of Haste.

Despite all of the problems that I had, I still think there’s a good game buried here. If there wasn’t, then there wouldn’t be so many people, myself included at times, having fun playing Haste. However, I kept running into small problems as I played, and that ultimately painted my experience in a negative light. To me, it really feels like Haste needed more time to cook before it was released, or Landfall could’ve taken it down the Early Access route.

To their credit, the folks at Landfall have been rapidly putting out new patches since Haste launched, so there’s a chance that some of my problems with the game will be addressed in the future. However, as I said at the top, I can’t review a speculative game. And, at the time of writing, I wouldn’t recommend Haste.

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