High on Life 2 review

I'm sorry Squanch, I wasn't familiar with your game.

No, literally: Despite first-person shooters filling my lungs with oxygen on a daily basis, I gave up on High on Life in 2022 because I burnt out on the Justin Roiland schtick. Rick and Morty was the perfectly messy nihilistic comedy for 18-year-old me, but daily life is drenched in enough ego madness these days that I no longer see the fun in observing something true and then beating it to death with a sledgehammer. High on Life was never so unrelenting in its cynicism, but it was grafting Roiland's voice to my hip in the form of a pistol that got us off on the wrong foot. It's a relationship I never bothered to mend after the disgraced Squanch co-founder resigned in 2023.

High on Life 2 instantly feels different without him. It's nicer, calmer—still very much violent and referential and fourth-wall demolitionist in its humor, but not entertained by cruelty or allergic to being genuine.

An early moment in the first game, wherein a child blocks your path and the joke is that you can kill a kid and isn't that messed up, would feel out of place in High on Life 2.

It's a game that's unabashedly a fan of gross stuff—of squishy bits and "trick holes," of body horror and buckets of blood, and of the occasional fart joke—but doesn't believe that's a pretense to be insufferable. It leaves behind an apparent embarrassment of being commercial art that permeated Roiland's past works and is largely comfortable being a fun shooter and serviceable send up of big pharma.

Outlaw king

You play as the Outlaw, the bounty hunter from the first game who spun their killing of a notorious galactic cartel into B-list celebrity status. You're soon catapulted into another hunt that's far more appropriate for the world we live in: assassinating the higher-ups of a major pharmaceutical company leading the charge to legalize human drug production—that is, the practice of literally turning humans into pain pills. You join a band of freedom fighters led by your sister (who has her own Gatlian talking gun), graduating from random gang killer to outlaw folk hero.

The intro is a small triumph: an interactive montage that takes us through the years that've passed through talk show appearances, fading friendships, relationship struggles, and the lonely monotony of bounty work while simultaneously teaching the basics of movement and shooting. It's creative, unexpected, and effective—an impression that I would keep returning to throughout High on Life 2.

Like, I didn't expect this movement shooter inspired by Doom Eternal to feature a level where the climax has little shooting. An early contract takes the Outlaw to a cruise ship owned by your target. Disguised as a VIP guest, you partake in an elaborate murder mystery with a list of suspects, clues you can miss, and a bespoke tool for handwritten notes that embeds in your suit UI. Every level has curveballs like this, and the best part is nothing like it ever happens again.

High on Life 2 has a hub city where you return to buy upgrades and pursue little sidequests, but the meat of it is an elaborate, galactic tour of weirdos in strange places. Where a contract says it'll take you is rarely where you end up.

It's rare to see so many bespoke assets and mechanics created for a fleeting moment in games (especially a singleplayer-only FPS) that don't have bajillion-dollar budgets. It comes from a relentless desire to make levels original and memorable—a trait that I associate with Double Fine, Nintendo, and now, Squanch.

Gat gat

I wish High on Life 2's combat could keep up. Despite Squanch making a bunch of excellent, subversive choices for a modern FPS, like ditching a traditional sprint for a skateboard that turns every fight into a two-hander to find clean skating lines while blasting, I never managed to have more than a medium amount of fun killing aliens.

The Outlaw's Gatlian arsenal is unbelievably well made, flexing both the most and best first-person animation work I've seen in ages, but they don't sound as cool as they look, and all the goopy globs start to run together as the weapon wheel fills out. Beyond a few outliers, like Creature's sticky grenades (that are actually his children) and Bowie the bow, there isn't enough complexity in High on Life 2's threats to justify its various flavors of pistols and rifles. Even on the hardest difficulty, I never felt pressured to rely on the Gatlians' secondary abilities, and infinite ammo meant I would only ever swap off my favorites out of guilt.

The skateboard never evolves either, which is a shame. Perhaps to preserve the comfort of our controller-gated console friends, I was disappointed High on Life 2 never let me get up to thrilling speed. There are some movement upgrades, like a pair of air dashes, but the Outlaw's top speed, even while grinding on rails, is disappointingly slow. I'm not expecting Echo Point Nova levels of unhinged locomotion, but I wanted more than the skateboard equivalent of those rails you hang from in Bioshock Infinite.

Sloppy landing

High on Life 2 is, I'm reluctant to admit, full of nitpicks that I willfully ignored for the majority of its 10-12 hour story, but eventually left a wound. My pre-release build started buggy and grew progressively busted with each level, culminating in a movement-focused sequence toward the end of the game totally breaking down in front of me several times. Dialogue will also overlap often and it's too easy to momentarily break scripting when you do things faster than the game expected.

Squanch is also the latest victim of our wonderous Unreal 5 future, where games look so detailed and realistically lit that they've never been harder to actually parse. There are officially too many graphics for games that rely on readability and, ya know, target acquisition, to be good at either of those things. It's also striking how often a believably bright light casts a believably dark shadow that makes the current dialogue scene I'm standing in look terrible because I can't see the faces of who's talking. Ultimately problems like that are Squanch's to fix, not Unreal, but it has all the markings of a UE5 game that let Lumen do too much of the work.

It'd certainly explain all of the performance issues players report on launch day. The streets are saying High on Life 2 is a rough ride on even good hardware right now—problems that this RTX 5090 and 9800X3D build managed to power through, but weren't immune to. I averaged around 90 fps at high settings and 1440p, but one level in particular ran like crap the entire time no matter what settings I changed. Not great! You would hope patches will clean this stuff up, but Squanch's brutal recommended specs (RTX 4080, i7-13700KF, 32GB RAM) suggest to me that optimization is more of a soft goal here.

Still, I walk away from High on Life 2 championing what it stands for. It's fun, goofy, and unashamed of types of good-natured humor that have fallen out of fashion. Not every joke lands, and maybe the guns still talk a little too much, but it doesn't persist on gimmicks. High on Life 2 is a barrage of actionable ideas and decent bits attached to a decent FPS and a shakier technical foundation. It's a nasty, cool, and uneven dose of a game we just don't get enough of these days: a singleplayer FPS campaign with a beating heart.