Latest news with #Haste:BrokenWorlds
Yahoo
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Haste: Broken Worlds finally lets me live out my childhood fantasy of running really fast and then slamming into a rock at Mach 1 and breaking all my bones
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. I've always had a hope, ever since I was little—that I would, someday, be able to run really fast and hit a rock and break all of my bones. Okay, that's not the exact dream, but as a mentally hyperactive kid with a strong imagination, I did spend a lot of my car journeys running an imaginary stickman along parallel traffic, or walking my fingers like legs across various obstacles in my home. You see, we didn't have tablets back then, so we had to fill in the time between episodes of Bamzooki (look it up). Luckily, Haste: Broken Worlds is here to finally make my dream come true. This roguelike bone-breaking simulator has an available demo during Steam Next Fest, and it's rather worth the concussions you'll be enduring. If you've played Descenders before, just imagine that game without the bike and less flips—if you haven't, then let me explain. Haste is a game about strategic falling. At the start of each level, your character'll take off at a pace—when they hit an incline, they'll carry on sailing into the air in a physics-defying but ultimately satisfying way. The trick is to make sure you come down at a good angle, and your only tools to do so are your innate sense of digital depth perception, some rough mental calculations, and a button that mercifully lets you speed up your descent in case you get either of the first two things wrong. Smoother landings lead to bigger boosts, and more energy to use your special ability. Image 1 of 3 Image 2 of 3 Image 3 of 3 If this sounds scary in a roguelike context, don't worry—Haste is decently forgiving. You start off with a health bar and a trio of hearts. Eat through your health (or plummet into the abyss) and you'll lose a heart, lose all three hearts, and your run's over. In each level, your job is to zip through as quickly and as cleanly as possible. To keep things from getting stale, you have a character-specific ability (there's just one available in the demo, a hoverboard that can be strategically deployed to go even faster) and items to purchase with Sparks, which can be both passive and active. Also, sometimes the game will try to blow you up. Its randomised levels include hazards to keep you on your toes, like giant lasers and giant missiles. There do seem to be bosses, though the demo only showcases one—which you damage by flinging your body into them hard enough to make them die. Sun Tzu was missing a trick, because it turns out giving yourself concussions is a valid battle tactic, as long as you're giving your opponent more. Visually-speaking, the game's also looking very pretty. Some gorgeous character artwork's being flexed here, and the environments are nice and colourful—and the wave of doom, which eats away at the level behind you (and devours you if you go too slow) is appropriately panic-inducing. I'm really just hankering for more. The demo's regrettably short, and I think what'll really give this game the juice is a variety of character options and terrain to slam into. Still, the proof of concept is strong with this one—and I'm looking forward to seeing how forcefully I can hurl myself into objects in the months to come. Oh, and how the game's turning out, too. Haste: Broken Worlds doesn't have a release date yet, but one of its characters ominously promises me it'll be sooner than we all think. Take that however you will. Steam sale dates: When's the next event?Epic Store free games: What's free right now?Free PC games: The best freebies you can grab2025 games: This year's upcoming releasesFree Steam games: No purchase necessary
Yahoo
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Steam Next Fest's best roguelike is a thing of flow-state beauty, and after a 3-year wait I'm completely obsessed with it
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. I'm not 100% sure why I'm running, but I know it feels good. A few NPCs have mentioned something about the end of the world, sure. And I know I'm traversing floating islands while dodging what looks like overzealous mining equipment and running from an all-consuming corruption, but Haste: Broken Worlds feels so good to play that I don't really care about any of that. All I really know is that this is a better Steam Next Fest demo than I'd hoped for, and everything else will have to be extremely impressive to beat it. I first got wind of Haste: Broken Worlds thanks to a very different game. The extremely silly ragdoll strategy game Totally Accurate Battle Simulator introduced me to developer Landfall, which has been teasing clips of its speedy new project for a few years now. Early prototype clips of a character moving at incredible speed through shattered landscapes caught my eye and ensured that Haste was one of my first Steam Next Fest downloads. As Zoe, you're escaping the end of the world. As you sprint through each procedural level, you're doing your best to outrun the corruption that's scarily close on your tail. Zoe's speed means that she can pick up some serious air off the gently undulating ridges of the remaining shards of the universe she's running through, but the catch is that while she's quick on her feet, she's not so fast in the air. As a result, Haste becomes a game about perfectly cresting those ridges, adjusting your trajectory ever-so-slightly to make sure you stick a perfect landing and keep sprinting ahead. The result is an incredible flow-state, reminiscent of the best of 3D Sonic and freerunning games like Mirror's Edge. A genuinely smooth run feels so good that you almost don't notice the obstacles scattered around the map like the world's most chaotic minigolf course. Add in the collectible sparks that function as both this world's currency and a subtle guide as to the optimal route, and you feel like you're almost floating through each level. Haste: Broken Worlds earns its roguelike stripes through a Slay the Spire-style map, allowing you to pick your route between normal runs, random encounters, shops and rest stops, and tricky boss levels - complex and unforgiving maps that reward you with strategy-altering bonuses if you can make it to the end. You'll enter each attempt with a handful of lives that persist between levels, enforcing speed and precision - collisions will harm Zoe and slow her down, and if you go off the map or get caught by the corruption, you'll lose a life and have to start the level over. Lose all three lives and you're starting from scratch, meaning a single tricky map can stop an entire attempt in its tracks, adding real stakes to every single crash or wrong turn. There's still a lot to come to Haste: Broken Worlds. The Steam Next Fest offering only includes the tutorial and one 'shard', culminating in a single boss fight, as well as a relatively small number of NPC encounters. But the procedural maps and the quality of the freerunning means that I've replayed it dozens of times already, and I'm still having an excellent time. We're only a matter of hours into the latest Next Fest, but I genuinely think this demo is going to be a tough one to beat. Our list of the best roguelikes could soon have a new challenger.
