High On Life Review: "Falls Under The Weight Of Its Ambitions"

A few hours into High on Life, you’ll be exploring a new planet. It’s colourful, vibrant, and brimming with secrets to uncover. All while you’re venturing into this new land, an alien is following you with his main role being to purposefully annoy the player. They’ll constantly bombard you with dialogue and expletives, and try their very hardest to block your view. It’s at this point you’ll either be howling with laughter or looking for the nearest window to launch your console out of.

The humour of High on Life has been a huge talking point since its initial reveal, and now the game is out in the wild, it’s clear there’s a divide between those who gel with it and the other side who want to plug their ears with the nearest inanimate object they can find. Creator Justin Roiland, the co-creator behind the highly regarded show Rick & Morty, clearly knows his audience, for better or for worse.

The Comedic Battle

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As expected with a Roiland narrative, things go into turbo fairly quickly as players are pushed from one ludicrous situation to the next. Everything begins with a short tutorial set within a faux DOOM-style game. It’s a fun start and one that sets the tone of High on Life fairly quickly. However, it’s not long before things ramp up and aliens invade earth.

The reason? Well, in space, humans are consumed as a drug - hence the title High on Life - because, why wouldn’t they be? The premise, despite being ridiculously silly, is actually a very funny one and opens up the gateway for some edgy humour in the later hours. After an introduction to Kenny - a talking gun who acts as your companion for the majority of the game - you’re whisked into space for your adventure to begin.

Soon afterward, you’ll meet Gene - a washed-up bounty hunter who acts as your guide into this new world. Your mission is to take down the G3 Cartel, who are trafficking the human population as a highly sought-after drug on the market. High on Life will take you through various civilizations and worlds as you aim to track down each bounty target and dismantle the G3 Cartel. 

All of this is wrapped in Roiland’s signature humour, which will either make or break the game for players. If poop and fart jokes are your cups of tea, you’ll feel right at home, but for everyone else, High on Life may be a hard drug to swallow. Moments of brilliance shine through the script, such as a sequence where you stumble into a movie theatre and listen to three aliens commentate on the film on-screen or even a few celebrity cameos, which are sure to tickle you.

It’s a shame these genuinely amusing gags are few and far apart, but as clearly seen from High on Life’s release, different comedy strokes work on people in different ways. The trend of Rick & Morty has always been dragging a joke out as long as humanly possible until the audience is backed into a corner to laugh. It works for short 20-minute-long episodes, but with High on Life, that joke is extended for hours upon hours, until players either succumb to it or want to bash their heads into the wall.

At one point, your guns will mock the game developers from adding yet another pipe for you to explore. When a game makes a joke about how repetitive one of its gameplay decisions is, and then draws awareness that critics will most likely mark the game down for the fact, it just feels lazy. Roiland has shown he - and his team - are capable of truly great comedy, and when those moments shine through in High on Life, they’re great, but it often feels like the easy joke is always made for a cheap laugh.

Despite all this, it’s worth mentioning that humour is incredibly subjective. It always has been and it always will be. Because of this, it makes it incredibly hard to critique a game that can work completely differently for various people, but unfortunately, High on Life does have fundamental issues in its game design that are worth raising.

Soulless Gunplay

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When you’re not listening to the game’s never-ending stream of dialogue, you’ll be battling down the G3 Cartel and their goons. As mentioned before, you’ll begin by finding Kenny, who acts as a pistol in the game. Early on into High on Life, you’ll be greeted by his secondary ability, which launches a powerful single glob shot. This can be used to launch enemies into the air, allowing you to get some extra shots in, or he can be used to solve environmental puzzles by pushing things aside such as platforms. 

As you progress through each G3 bounty target, you’ll meet more and more alien guns. They’ll chew your ear off, but they’ll also introduce new gameplay mechanics. A shotgun doubles up as a means to fire saw blades which can be used as platforms to manoeuvre across, whilst an SMG, similar to Halo’s needler, can slow down time on deadly fan blades that will rip you apart in seconds, allowing you to squeeze through without taking damage.

Each of these sounds fantastic in concept, as if they’ll open up new ways of playing, but unfortunately, they do very little to spruce up the mundane firefights. Throughout the 10-12 hour long story, you’ll encounter a small variety of alien species to take down. New variants are introduced, such as snipers and gargantuan hulk type foes, but none of which will dramatically cause you to switch up your gameplay styles. How you tackle gunfights in the opening hours is most likely the same as you will be in High on Life’s closing moments.

For the majority of our playthrough, we stuck with Kenny and his pistol form, as it dished out the most damage and made quick work of everyone blocking our path. You can find upgrades for your guns throughout the world via locked chests or by visiting the pawn shop back in the hub world, but each does very little to make a meaningful impact. It’s clear the game is trying to create some DOOM-style combat arenas, as you boost and grapple your way across the arena, but it never builds upon that premise as the narrative goes on.

The feedback on each weapon feels reasonably weak too. Shotgun blasts don’t feel powerful enough, and when you unlock the ability to do sniper-style shots with another gun, it doesn’t feel as satisfying as it probably should. It’s an admirable attempt from Squanch Games, whose previous work has primarily been in VR titles, but it feels as though the fundamentals have been missed entirely here. There’s an artificial and plastic feeling to every weapon, which is ironic when each one is technically a living organism.

Each bounty target you take on culminates in a high-stakes boss fight, and High on Life does its best to mix things up in these scenarios. Your first boss will see you using a grappling hook to avoid environmental hazards, whilst raining gunfire on the target below. Later ones up the ante and feel reminiscent of bosses you may find in Returnal, as you’ll have to avoid a wave of hazards whilst retaliating. Unfortunately, while the hazards themselves are spruced up as the game goes on, each boss boils down to continuously firing and whittling down their lengthy health bar until they’ve been defeated.

A Metroidvania With No Incentive

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Outside of combat encounters, you’ll have three main planets to explore, each with its own diverse look and feel. The main hub acts as your standard spaceport, where you have shops to spend cash at, and even a TV to watch real-life movies such as Tammy and the T-Rex. As for the other two, one acts as a wild west theme with underground slums, whilst the final has you exploring a vibrant, lush forest area commanded by a civilization of cute and cuddly teddy bears.

High on Life prides itself on delivering stunning vistas and a unique visual art style, and the direction is one of the highlights of the game. From the alien design to the world-building, Squanch Games know how to deliver an assault on the sense, which at times, can be overbearing. But for the most part, the art direction of the game is an absolute highlight. 

While everything looks wondrous on the surface, the act of exploration is less enticing. Each world is presented in a Metroidvania fashion, with some areas inaccessible until you’ve unlocked new guns with new abilities. For the most part, the paths you take through these worlds are fairly linear, with a few diverting paths to hidden chests filled with coins, collectibles, and sometimes upgrades for your guns. You’ll be able to clearly see a new route via visual indicators, such as red glowing walls you can fire saw blades into or silver surfaces for your mag-boots.

There’s room for exploration, but none of these secret paths or puzzles evolve in any meaningful way. You’ll always complete the same environmental objective to reach one, whether that be slowing down some fans to reach a chest behind it, or using your jetpack to venture to a hard-to-reach location. High on Life never mixes using multiple abilities together, making exploration feel extremely one-note. Even a later game puzzle sequence has you using each gun individually in each room rather than in perfect harmony.

The best games in the Metroidvania genre make earning a new ability a huge moment. You’re able to reach previously inaccessible areas for health upgrades or powerful tools that were once unobtainable. However, in High on Life, things are as simple as jet-packing to a roof to find a chest - it never feels rewarding. The lack of incentive makes what should feel like a more open-ended adventure feel strictly linear.

It doesn’t help that the items you receive for exploring are rarely worthwhile. Collectible cards pose no value other than filling up your inventory, gun upgrades for weapons feel minuscule, and coins feel meaningless in the later hours as you’ll only be spending them on upgrades you don’t really need. Sure, it’s nice to increase your health, but when the highest difficulty of High on Life barely poses a threat, it doesn’t feel like the huge jump that it should. 

During our playtime, an array of technical issues also arose on a regular basis as we explored. At multiple points, we needed to reload our save due to enemies not spawning or objectives not triggering. Several achievements and trophies failed to unlock, character dialogue would often be cut out, and collectible items would randomly become unobtainable. Even after two patches post-release, these issues still reared their ugly head on a consistent basis.

A Mixed Bag

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High on Life feels as though it's a game that has a solid foundation of ideas, but never truly knows how to build upon them. It’s clear Squanch Games knows how to create fun, hilarious adventures, as evidenced in previous work such as Trover Saves the Universe and Accounting, but it never comes together in one cohesive package here.

Gunfights feel soulless and exploration lacks incentive, leaving the comedy to do the heavy lifting. For some players, this will work to easily distract them from High on Life’s bigger problems, but for others, it will make playing the game feel like an absolute slog. Bundled in with the fact that dialogue is a constant battle to contend with, it can make or break a player’s experience.

For all its faults, the humour is the least of High on Life’s concerns. While set-pieces, such as helping an alien feed his poop to another, will undoubtedly be divisive amongst the player base, the fact that the fundamental gameplay loop just isn’t very fun is a much bigger problem. Despite a visual art style that, at times, can be truly jaw-dropping, it’s clear Roiland and his team may have been buried underneath the weight of their ambitions.

2/5

Reviewed on Xbox Series X.