Haste

Haste is a roguelite with a big focus on a story but the story just sucks, doesn't do anything interesting with the "time loop" premise, and actively ruins your experience. To add to that, the run to run difference that this genre is known for is severely lacking which leads to every run playing the exact same way, getting stale quickly. Before I get deeper into my problems with this game, I'll first commend this game for what it does well — the satisfying movement. The game consists of shards. Within each shard, you get a Slay the Spire map and have to pick your path to a boss. Most of the path is gameplay levels which consist of you running through short procedurally generated worlds (usually no longer than a minute) while a slow damaging barrier takes over the world. You need to try and outrun it by gaining speed from not crashing into obstacles and chaining good landings. These are the best bits of the game. Its fun and satisfying to chain perfect landings and soar to the end of a level, like a cs bhop map mixed with the laid backness of subway surfers. And look, this part of the game is done well. Most landings don't feel unfair and the generated levels always have some flow to them. Now if you don't know, Haste is the first game from this studio that has a story. Landfall is known for making games with unique and engaging gameplay; TABS, Cluster Truck, stick fight the game, and a few more. It was exciting to see them take a crack at writing an interesting story that would fuse with their gameplay to create a classi- it's the blandest piece of ♥♥♥♥. The basis for any good story are the characters and boy are they terrible. Look at the character portraits; they have detail, unlimited detail, but no detail. The general ideas you get about them from the portrait? THAT’S THE ENTIRE CHARACTER. A stale and boring cliche without an ink of personality. They look like boring version of Supergiant character's without any of the writing to back them up. And dude the dialogue is also so piss. Never before have so many words been used to say absolutely nothing. The emotional moments also sound like tumblr/digital circus writing. The premise itself is like Stein's gate but from the perspective of someone who can't read Steiner. Interesting thought until you remember that that anime was so good because of your connection to the characters. Like I hate to skip dialogue in games but at a point you realise you can just skippa skippa and miss nothing. Now the bad story wouldn't be that bad if it wasn't bloating the game and constantly put in the middle of your runs, ruining the pacing. That's the other problem, I'm trying to play the game but they just don’t want me to, mfers HATE a white boy subway surfing. On the Slay the Spire map all the things that aren't gameplay levels are just useless. Campfires have you walk in a tiny space and have a conversation, which takes too much time for something that adds no flavour to the game. The ?'s sometimes have a gimmick level which is a fun twist up but usually its just flavourless flavour text + an item. The shops for the most part are just shops but sometimes there’s, god forbid, dialogue. I think just taking how Slay the Spire does all of these with a point and click menu just would've been better (tbf STS is a menu's game so ig it might be a bit weird for Haste but I'd prefer it). The shop is a perfect segue to my final problem. It's very clear that any healing item is always the best pick and all the others do such miniscule things that every run is just the same thing over and over again. It's fun but it's not that long before it gets repetitive, espacially since the game never gets hard. Let's not forget that this game costs like 20 USD for some reason. HELLO?!? what are we doing here??? I don't like to think of the price tag when reviewing stuff but this isn't high art man, this is just slop to have on your main monitor while you watch something on your second. It’s not even good slop, so many better options. Even if you're like me and got this very cheap from the Agrocrab x Landfall games bundle then I still wouldn't recommend it. This the type of game to make you remember your time on this planet is very limited so you better turn this ♥♥♥♥ off and play something better. 4/10 (score is kinda high because the 2nd monitor content was that good).