It’s been a decent break since Squanch Games’ comical High On Life initially debuted. I had a complete blast with it, with its explorable worlds and fun-to-use arsenal of talkative guns, but the question remains if they can nail that magic a second time. With High On Life 2, they show that they’ve still got a few jokes left up their sleeves.
High On Life 2
Developer: Squanch Games
Price: $60
Platform: PC (reviewed), PlayStation 5, Switch 2 and Xbox Series X/S
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
Usually, when the phrase “more of the same” is used, it’s done in a somewhat dismissive way, but High On Life 2 is giving emphasis on the “more” here. After the events of the previous game, your character becomes a full-fledged (and quite famous) bounty hunter known all across the galaxy. Just like in the previous game, however, aliens can’t stop turning humans into drugs to get high off of, as Rhea Pharmaceuticals begins pushing for legislation to legally classify the human race as cattle, which pushes you and your crew into a deeper conspiracy. As with the first game, it’s all incredibly silly and over-the-top, and the writers did a great job of making the whole world feel unified in its absurdity instead of feeling like a revolving door of gags. Very few games attempt comedy, and even fewer pull it off, but I was constantly running into different gags that always got at least a chuckle out of me. You might run into a crane game themed on Frasier that rewards silly pillows for your bedroom, or have to perform at a comedy club in the city. High On Life 2 is always ready to dole out a new laugh, and it’s impressive how often the jokes land.
High on Life 2 Has More Guns, More Jokes, More Chaos
If you missed out on the first game, High On Life 2 is a (sort of) open-world adventure game where you have these various levels that you’re free to fully explore for story missions or whatever distraction you might come across. What’s great about this game is how varied the world’s activities are, since one moment you might be on a cruise ship trying to solve a murder or blasting your way through a convention for conventions. Hell, at one moment, I stumbled into an escape room business that pulled me into a deeper side-quest than I initially thought it’d be. If you poke your head somewhere, there’s a good chance you’ll find something to either do or laugh at. And just like the last game, the worlds are meant to be re-explored as you’ll come across puzzles you can’t complete till you unlock a new gun or ability later in the game.
Just like before, the main stars of the game are your sentient talking guns who’ll be joining you on your various adventures. While they all serve a typical function like being a shotgun, burst rifle, or pistol, they all have additional combat and puzzle utilities like being able to juggle enemies in the air or fire electrified harpoons that you can zip around like Yondu from Guardians of the Galaxy. Ken Marino of Brooklyn 99 fame and Ralph Ineson of Ruining Families of Four fame make appearances as two new guns you’ll be able to use alongside some returning favorites like Betsy Sodaro and J.B. Smoove. Like in the previous game, a lot of your experience with High On Life 2 is determined by what gun you have out at any particular moment, because that’s the one that’s going to be speaking for you. Others might chime in from the background every now and then, but if you gravitate towards a particular gun’s humor, the jokes in a conversation will differ from others. I found myself instantly enamored with Ken Marino’s Travis, an SMG who’s going through a particularly rough divorce and is basically a sad sack of shit in the best way possible. But all the characters are great, and you’ll likely end up swapping them around constantly.
The biggest change High On Life 2 brings to the table is the inclusion of a skateboard as a replacement for your typical sprint maneuver. Instead of bursting into a sprint, you’ll whip out a skateboard that you can grind environmental objects with, wall-ride, and even get some air on halfpipes seamlessly built into building walls. Additionally, you can customize every part of your board to truly make it yours. I can’t stress enough how good it feels to skate around the game’s various worlds, and I sometimes found myself distractingly skating around just for the sake of it. It even serves a combat function, as you can launch your board at enemies to stun them. High On Life 2’s worlds feature dozens of hidden boxes filled with loot for you to find, and being able to skate around to find them scratched a collectible itch I hadn’t felt since Crackdown.
Not everything is rosy in the world, however, as I ran into a variety of performance issues. I would regularly run into frame-rate dips in seemingly innocuous areas, which I’m guessing was tied to the game trying to load something all of a sudden. I also encountered frequent crashes in certain parts and bugs that impeded my story progress, where a door wouldn’t open, or a character wouldn’t speak. Thankfully, a quick checkpoint restart fixed that. Perhaps the most unusual bug I found was that if you had Post Processing set to Low (and sometimes Medium), certain actions (like using Gus’s suction ability or triggering your waypoint finder) would cause this extreme visual glitch to occur across the screen for a few seconds. The only fix I found was to keep that setting on High. I did receive a notice that Squanch Games was aware of some of these issues, and that they were due to be fixed with a day 1 patch.
The Final Word
High On Life 2 is an absolute blast, and I dare you to find a funnier game to play this year.
MonsterVine Rating: 4.5 out of 5 – Great
