Haste

I put Haste on expecting a flashy infinite runner and got something that kept me up until 2am chasing perfect landings. The core idea is deceptively lean: you play Zoe, a courier sprinting through procedurally generated worlds that are literally falling apart, and your only real tool is momentum. There is no dedicated jump button. Instead, Zoe launches automatically off any ledge or hill, and your job is to angle the nose-dive into the next slope and nail a rated landing. Perfect, Good, Ok, or Bad pops up on screen, and each grade feeds your energy bar for abilities. Get it right and you enter the kind of flow state you barely notice until it breaks. Get it wrong on a higher difficulty and the game is genuinely unforgiving. The structure underneath that sensation is a roguelite built around ten Shards, each a procedurally assembled gauntlet of levels you have to clear in one run without wiping out. Along the way you pick up items from shops and character encounters, and a Sparks currency carries progress between runs for upgrades. The item balance has attracted some fair criticism. Rarer pickups are occasionally weaker than common ones, and the roguelite shop system can feel arbitrary rather than strategic. Boss fights also attract mixed feelings: they are epic in scale and genuinely tense, but the arenas often fight against your momentum rather than with it, which is jarring in a game that is otherwise obsessed with keeping you at speed. The procedural generation, too, swings between exhilarating and maddening depending on what the level throws at you. When it is bad, you lose runs to layout rather than skill, which stings. Once you clear the ten Shards there is an Endless Mode, an unlockable Shard with no shops or rest stops where difficulty ramps every ten levels and you choose from three random items to compensate. It is a great pressure valve for players who want pure speed without narrative pacing, and it adds meaningful replay time after the story wraps. Speaking of which, Haste is Landfall's first serious push at characters and story alongside their trademark arcade feel, and Zoe's world is charming enough that you actually want to know what happens. For the multiplayer angle, which matters a lot to me: Landfall shipped a full online co-op update post-launch called Run Together, supporting up to four players through the entire game. There are no separate co-op menus or locked stages. You or a friend hosts a run, others drop in using Steam invites or a six-digit join code, and the Shards play out cooperatively with individual time tracking so there is still a bit of competitive bite between friends. It is exactly the low-friction session setup that makes a game easy to recommend for a group night. No split-screen though, so the couch crowd stays online-only. The controller support is solid and the game works fine on a gamepad, which is actually the recommended way to play given the analogue control over your landing angle. Steam player reception sits at 93% positive across a large sample, and that number has held steady well after launch. Critics pointed at the same rough edges I noticed (boss arena design, item balance, occasional layout frustration) but almost everyone agreed the moment-to-moment running feels unlike anything else out right now. The accessibility options are genuinely good: you can tune difficulty parameters individually or pick preset modes, so casual players who just want the speed fantasy without the punishment can find their level.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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