High on Life 2 Review – Talking Guns Take On Big Pharma

High on Life 2 Review

I enjoyed 2022’s High on Life, the profane first-person shooter from Squanch Games. But it had some issues. Sluggish platforming, uninspired level design, and a paper-thin plot undermined the game’s joyous willingness to go anywhere with its humor and 4th wall-breaking weird ideas. By almost any measure, High on Life 2 is an improvement on the first game. Movement and controls are infinitely better, levels are more imaginative, and the narrative is functionally coherent. The shock value is gone, but it has been replaced by a better overall experience. That’s surprising in itself.

A True Sequel

Sometimes game sequels are so in-name-only. High on Life 2, however, directly continues a larger story introduced in the first High on Life. For players who missed the original, High on Life 2 has one of the smartest and most entertaining tutorial/recaps I’ve seen in a game.

In High on Life, you played a slacker character whose life was upended by the invasion of aliens. Said aliens intended to farm humans to use as recreational drugs. You become a bounty hunter, bringing down key members of the G3 Cartel that’s running the operation. Oh, and your guns — actually belonging to another alien race, the Gatlians — talk back to you. They swear, whine, cajole, mock, and encourage. It’s hilarious a lot of the time. If that is, you vibe with Squanch’s Adult Swim/Rick and Morty-esque take on comedy.

High on Life 2 starts with your character having become a celebrity bounty hunter. As you make the rounds of talk shows and podcasts, you relive scenes from your exploits, which serve as tutorial snippets for the game’s mechanics and backstory. You can skip through a lot of it, but it’s definitely worth playing, and basically required for new players.

Skating Through Life

Without giving too much of the plot away, the sequel turns a lot of the plot upside down. In saving your eco-terrorist/human rights activist sister, you break the bounty hunter’s code and become the hunted yourself. Big picture, you’re trying to stop Rhea Pharmaceuticals from harvesting humans to make the hilariously named Humanzapro, a highly addictive antidepressant. You need to take out five big Rhea-connected honchos. Ok, it isn’t entirely a different story. But this time around, the game pauses now and then to let the narrative breathe without undermining it with too many jokes.

High on Life 2 features much more ambitious, elaborate, and visually impressive level designs. Again, I hate to spoil the fun, but the hub-and-spoke world will send you places like a ConCon, devoted entirely to an odd and funny fan convention or a futuristic cruise liner.  If it sounds like all the environments are perfect for pointed cultural satire, that’s because, no duh, they are. There’s a lot more variety to the missions this time around, though ultimately, combat is always the focus.

Early in the game, you get a skateboard, and it has a huge influence on level design. Spaces are much larger and built for grinding, jumping, and speeding around on the skateboard, Tony Hawk style. It gives High on Life 2 a frenetic sense of smooth movement that was entirely absent in the first game. Movement in general is much more fluid and refined. The feeling of wading through sludge is gone. The much bigger spaces also give the developers more real estate for visual jokes and hidden humor. I definitely won’t spoil that.

Talk and Shoot

High on Life’s biggest hook was guns that had distinct personalities and voices. The conceit remains central to the sequel, with several weapons returning and a few new ones joining the cast. Weapons continue to have primary and secondary uses, and switching between them — and the weapons themselves — is generally fast and intuitive. Just like before, your tolerance for the weapons’ personalities and specific senses of humor will vary, but you can adjust how chatty they are.

Coming from the world of comedy, it’s no surprise that the developers know how to guide their actors toward effective improvisation and line readings. Whether new or returning, the guns and the cast in general are incredibly entertaining and obviously invested in their roles. Overall, the game’s sound design is excellent, though the music — especially during action sequences — doesn’t have much identity.

Perfection Evaded

Profane, raw humor is nothing new to first-person shooters. In fact, it often goes hand-in-hand with the metal attitude that shooters sometimes embrace. High on Life’s potty-mouthed, ironic, and hyperactive humor came from a different place, the world of Adult Swim cartoons like Rick and Morty. In High on Life, the jokes came thick and fast, and they were willing to break the fourth wall, be self-referential, and poke fun at just about every cow, sacred or not.

Like the first game, High on Life 2 bombards the player with highbrow, lowbrow, and mid-brow humor, with the expectation that at least some of it will land. I wouldn’t say it feels tame or tired, but the first game’s novelty and thinly disguised rage have been replaced by a little less edge and a bit more coherence. However, High on Life 2’s style of humor remains intentionally divisive. You might come for the shooting and skateboarding, but the jokes are still a big part of the game. If they’re not your cup of tea, well, you have a whole lot of tea to drink.

There have been reports of some significant technical issues. On my particular PC, I had some persistent frame rate slowdowns and hiccups, but nothing especially dramatic or game-breaking.

While it doesn’t have the shock value novelty of the first game, High on Life 2 makes up for it with ambitious level design, polished movement, and a more grounded, coherent narrative. All the fun of the first game’s talking guns and wicked humor remains, entertainingly voiced and paired with engaging combat and interesting environments. There are moments when High on Life 2 feels a little over-caffeinated, and it can be exhausting over long stretches. Overall, though, High on Life 2 demonstrates that the first game’s concepts and mechanics were more than one-off novelties. High on Life 2 keeps a good thing going strong.

***Xbox code provided by the publishers for review***