Haste

I was wavering on whether to give this game a positive or negative review for a while, but after contemplating it, i think unfortunately it's gonna have to end up a negative. Now before i get into the main issues which drag this game down for me, i want to say, the core gameplay is great, like genuinely superbly fun and i really wish to see it used in another game, as it's a crying shame to be stuck here. Hopefully we can see a sequel or a spin-off at some point. (Plus bonus points for a great soundtrack!) But, and this is a big but... The rest of the game sucks, just genuinely blows. Now it's not Mindseye bad where it's clearly just unapologetically terrible, but rather, none of the game mechanics flow well into each other, or are done well enough for them to be fun. Considering that outside of the main gameplay, everything has issues, let me split this into a few chunks: Story - I'm sorry to say, but this one is the only point where i can't say it could have worked with more polish. It's just incredibly boring, none of the characters have anything interesting to say (or are interesting), and about halfway through the game i just started skipping through all the dialogue. The worlds falling apart concept can work, but the writing here is just dead on arrival. The roguelike aspect - Yeah this... just doesn't work here. Maybe it's just me being tired of the "pick 3" formula, but this is genuinely the most "this didn't need to be a roguelike" game i've ever played. It is the main crux of the game, and the one that causes it's most major issues. These being: Boring and repetitive worlds - The game would have been so, so much better were there less levels, and they were each hand-crafted unique challenges. Items - Just as a whole, the items are pointless here. All items you pick up during a run do not have a decisive impact on gameplay, all they do is either increase your speed, money or health, and that is all. At the beginning and end of a run, you will still be playing the same way, only be slightly faster, or immune to damage, or have an instant revive. Nothing about your gameplay will fundamentally change, which is the sauce that makes most roguelikes so fun to replay, and which makes this one fall flat on it's face, and become a drawback that ends up holding it's gameplay back. Shards - This ends up looping back around to my issue with this game being a roguelike, but the shards are just annoying. At first they're short and simple, but by the end of the game they get so long that they just end up being a slog of samey levels, repeated over and over just so you can buy some basic items to make the boss easier. It just ends up feeling shallow and boring. And a honorable mention to the bosses of which there are 4 in the game. (Yes 4, even though the game has 10 shards, and 1 of these is the final boss. So 3 bosses repeated 3 times.), all of which end up feeling utterly boring after your first time fighting them, and honorable mention to the final boss which is the most boring and stupidly easy of them all, only made difficult by the addition of cheap insta-kill void spaces. All in all, Haste is a game with a great base gameplay loop, made mediocre by the entire rest of the game surrounding it. Recommend on sale, if the issues sound like something that wouldn't bother you. Otherwise pass.

你跑不过我你信吗

What Sonic and other running/racing/parkour games SHOULD'VE been. The rush on every drop and jump is fantastic! Please put it in SOME hall of fame.

started running at 200 meters per second met a really chill and kinda scary guy with a butterfly almost got overtaken by the end of the world several times faceplanted into a rock and almost died bought the game played it 10/10

As many others have stated, an excellent core, but a few elements bring it down quite a bit. Haste feels like it's excusing itself constantly "Oh I'm sorry about my gameplay being arcade-y. Here have rouge-lite elements to add something modern" and "Oh I'm sorry about you just ploughing through the game. Here have some story bits to pad it out and add variety". I'm here because I want to get through stages quickly and improve at getting through stages quickly, I don't care about about uninteresting characters popping in explaining in too many words and for the fifteenth time that all worlds are ending and that they are currently acting very [singular character trait]. Doesn't help that most of the singular character traits aren't interesting. It also doesn't help that we start in medias res, meaning we have to piece together an uninteresting story in part from context clues, which I quickly stopped doing. Some people have written that it feels like we are getting dialogue out of order, but in my experience it simply feels that way since context is lacking. Even when new characters and concepts get revealed to the characters, it feels like they are thrust upon you without the proper setup. Perhaps accurate to the main character being a speedster who doesn't have time to slow down and get all the details, but if that was the case, then she wouldn't have time to talk in the first place. Rouge-lite elements also feel shoehorned in. It's a game where you can't jump, you are usually only touching two buttons and one analogue stick, and you only have four variables to play around with (Speed, energy, health and money), so the possible design space is very limited for items to begin with. I will confess that my experience with rouge-lites is limited, but even from the little I've played, I can tell that this is extremely shallow. I don't feel a difference between the start and end of most of my runs, and the few where I do, I'd more chalk it up to getting in to the flow without interruptions as the run went on. The levels also feels half-hearted. They could have gone for a curated short experience where you have a few designed levels that are fun to traverse and perfect ala Sonic, or they could have embraced the arcade-y nature of these "hill-matching" infinite traversal games with a solid level generation and gone for a wide variety of different themes and obstacles, but we have neither. The appeal is the traversal, and therefore levels should be the main focus, but it feels like the developers didn't get that. It doesn't feel like the level generator they have has enough sanity checks either, as the difficulty of any level feels arbitrary. You get random spikes of difficulty and ease. Concluding thought is that a great score-attack game lies buried beneath superfluous mechanics and features in Haste, and with a few different choices it could have been a great game to return to now and again. As it stands I'll probably finish it some idle weekend, but I won't play it again after that.

Games getting carried by the music tuttorial needs a heavy rework it start kinda slow but it turns addictive really fast

A good game all about going fast. If you like going fast, it's good. If you don't like going fast, I can't associate with you anymore. When in doubt, go faster. Two minor critiques- the metaprogression is a bit slow, and it would have really benefitted from voice acting, to the point where the story feels shallow and hard to invest in without it. Still 100% worthwhile though.

Je cours très vite, je saute très haut, la musique est très forte. 10/10