Orion Haste

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Let’s go on a journey through time – think back, long, long ago, to the late 2000s to mid 2010s, and you might recall a magical web design framework called Flash. Flash was ubiquitous for quite some time. You’d see it while paying your bills, shopping online and, well, basically all the time otherwise. What many of us might remember Flash for, though, is its vast and varied array of games. Pretty much any genre of game you wanted was likely to be represented on Flash, and thanks to sites like Kongregate, Newgrounds and plenty of others, there’s a pretty good chance it was free.

The years passed as years do, though, and thanks to a variety of factors, Flash bit the dust and took its games with it. That’s not to say the heart and soul of Flash games ceased to exist, though. They’re still around, you probably just have to pay ten bucks apiece for them on Steam or the Switch store. That’s the situation we end up in with Orion Haste, a run-and-gun shooter that would’ve fit in with the best on Newgrounds but struggles a bit to stand out as something you pay for on modern platforms.

via YouTube

As you’d expect from the classic run-and-guns, there’s a plot here that’s so thin it looks like the bottom of a Five Guys bag. The good aliens help produce oxygen, they’re being attacked by the bad aliens, and as one of the good aliens’ human allies it’s your job to blast some bad aliens into space dust. You don’t really need any more than that to make a game like this work, so it’s probably for the best that more time wasn’t spent on crafting an elaborate space opera narrative. The best operas use gunfire for percussion, after all.

With that out of the way, it’s pretty easy to describe Orion Haste: “we have Contra at home.” Your side-scrolling spaceman’s got a variety of weapons and there’s plenty of baddies to use them on. When the baddies shoot back, you’ll rely on jumping and going prone to avoid their bullets. It’s the same kind of experience we’ve been having with these games since you rented them from Blockbuster. You need a little bit of chutzpah to release your Contra clone within shouting distance of that storied franchise’s return with the recent Contra: Operation Galuga, but you better believe that’s what Orion Haste is doing. Notably, that game also has multiplayer, while Orion Haste only lets you play with yourself. It’s something of a missed opportunity.

None of this is bad, necessarily, save for the lack of multiplayer. It’s just not particularly groundbreaking. There’s a few cute minigame segments here, like a bike level, but nothing Orion Haste does really changes the fact that you could be playing Contra instead. There aren’t any huge missteps here, though Orion Haste does have something of an attraction to surprise death pits; the pixel art, while nice, is a culprit here, as there’s definitely moments where you might fall past a “platform” you thought was solid and end up dying for it. Still, this is a bite-sized shooter and it’s easy to forgive slip-ups like this when they don’t last very long.

An industry without clones would be a sad, quiet industry indeed, so don’t take any of the above to imply that Orion Haste isn’t worth playing. It just struggles to stand out when multiple titles are launched each week that clamor for your attention. If you’ve got ten bucks and an hour to spare, though, Orion Haste might scratch that side-scrolling alien-slaughtering itch for a little while. Just don’t be surprised if, when you’re done, you find yourself heading back to Contra for another hit of the real deal – much like you might have back in the days of Flash.