Haste: Broken Worlds - Sonic Sprint Through Shattered Realms

• DEVELOPER: Landfall Games
• PUBLISHER: Landfall Games
• PLATFORMS: PC
• GENRE: Running roguelike
• RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2025
• STARTING PRICE: 19,50 €
• REVIEWED VERSION: PC

Landfall Games, the Swedish indie studio behind chaotic physics-based hits like Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, Clustertruck, and Content Warning, is shifting gears, literally, with Haste: Broken Worlds. Trading its signature wobbly mayhem for speed, the game transforms a viral 2021 multiplayer prototype into a single-player roguelike. You will race through procedurally generated levels, desperately outrunning a collapsing universe. Haste is all about velocity and merging momentum-driven platforming with a surreal story. While it captures the euphoria of speed, some elements are not fully polished.

Momentum Is Your Master

You play as Zoe, a quick and agile runner who can open portals between worlds. Her mission is to deliver letters across a crumbling multiverse while outrunning its destruction. The gameplay is simple but addictive: blast through randomly generated courses, jump off ramps and obstacles, fly through the air, and stick your landings to keep your speed up. Each level is a “shard”, a set of short, obstacle-packed stages that end with a boss fight or a mad dash through a closing portal. And the whole time, the “darkness” is chasing you, a black void that eats the level if you’re too slow, forcing you to run.

Haste’s controls are tight and responsive, with a momentum system that makes every move count. Slopes become speed boosts, ramps turn into launchpads, and perfect landings refill your stamina for special moves like air dashes or hoverboard bursts. The key to winning is to master the terrain, chain your jumps, and stick those landings.

Danger keeps you on your toes: dodge spinning lasers, evade missile storms, and weave through spiked vines, all while racing against the void. Quick pit stops at shops and campfires let you heal or upgrade, but hesitate too long and the darkness catches up. You get three hearts per run; lose them all from falls or hits, and it’s back to the starting hub.

Stylish Dashes, Rough Difficulty Spikes

The roguelike structure works through Shards (ten unique level sets), each with its own biome like snowy peaks, desert dunes, or glowing caves and tougher challenges. Between runs, you return to a hub where you can practice, talk to NPCs, and spend Sparks (earned in-game) on upgrades, either passive boosts (more health, faster stamina) or active gear (a grappling hook). Later, you can unlock Endless Mode, which removes shops and gets harder every ten levels. And at launch, Steam Workshop support lets players create and share custom levels.

However, Haste has some rough edges. Upgrades and abilities get the job done but rarely feel game-changing (besides healing). Bosses look amazing but most fights just come down to charging at them full-speed. The randomly generated levels keep things unpredictable, but sometimes the difficulty spikes unfairly; you’ll breeze through one level, then hit a brutal stretch with no room to recover. Early mistakes aren’t too punishing, but later levels can feel cruel without checkpoints, especially in longer runs.

Haste marks Landfall’s best-looking game yet. Its bright, cartoonish style makes every biome pop against the creeping darkness. Speed effects like motion trails and portal flashes make runs feel even faster, though some objects look plain next to the detailed environments. The soundtrack absolutely slaps, a driving electronic score that actually speeds up when you’re flying and slows down when you’re struggling.

Ending Thoughts

The game nails its core thrill – the momentum system is near-perfect, easy to grasp but demanding to master, delivering pure adrenaline when you hit your stride. But the roguelike framework falters: upgrades feel underwhelming, later Shards get repetitive, and the grind becomes tedious. Most surprisingly for a Landfall game, there’s no multiplayer or competitive elements.

While Landfall traded their signature multiplayer chaos for a single-player experience, the result is their most polished game yet. Surprisingly, there’s actual substance beyond the sprinting, memorable NPCs and a proper story give purpose to your frantic dashes. It may not reinvent the genre, but for those craving an intense speed, this is one hell of a ride. Besides, hopefully, the Steam Workshop might deliver a lot of good content for this game.

Review copy provided by the publisher

4.2