High on Life - Review
High on Life is a comedic first-person action-adventure with talking guns, countless aliens and a ludicrous amount of space crime.
High on Life is the newest endeavour by Justin Roiland and his team at Squanch Games. Roiland is famous for his work with Adult Swim as a co-creator of Rick and Morty, and also as the infamous VA for both Rick Sanchez and Morty Smith in the show. High on Life is more of that style of humour extended out over an extended ten-hour narrative. A relatively straight forward first-person action-adventure game High on Life aims to take you on a comedy filled journey which will ultimately depend on your level of tolerance for the comedy stylings of Roiland.
Do you find Rick & Morty funny, engaging and enjoyable? You’re likely to find High on Life funny, engaging and enjoyable. Do you find it asinine, childish and immature? You’re probably going to find High on Life the same. For the most part, High on Life is a good experience. A funny experience for early teenage to late 20’s demographic that it is catering towards. It plays generally well, doesn’t overstay its welcome and generally has enough specific interactions to player input to make it feel alive and constant without becoming a problematic repetitive mess as is often the case in games with an emphasis on a ‘funny Ha-Ha’ narrator or character that talks a lot.
The story itself is amusing, hints at real world comparison. Aliens invade to turn the human race into their new drug of choice. You, a nobody silent protagonist who was going nowhere in life and wanted to play games rather than get his life together now must save the galaxy as a bounty hunter. A genocide of an alien race that resembles talking guns known as Gatlians. The story is very much brewed in the brain of Roiland and the team at Squanch. There are twists and turns along the way to keep it feeling fresh, but it isn’t a story that hasn’t happened before. Just with Aliens that look like Jabba the Hut and with Taco heads.
If you find yourself getting annoyed by the gun chatter there is an option to turn it down the in-game. This reduces the amount of times your talking guns will talk over the events in game, and how often they’ll yell at you for trying to kill everyone. And if you aren’t actively trying to shoot every single NPC you go past, you may in fact be missing out on the part of the game that I found the most humorous. The fact my guns really couldn’t comprehend how blood thirsty I truly wished I could be in this over the top and hallucinatory alien adventure.
The guns themselves do lend themselves to an area of problems for me. You’ll unlock 5 across the game, one being the ultimate gun for the final boss stage only, the other four being staggered across the first half of the game or so. Each gun has their own personality, and some iconic actors to bring them to life. Unfortunately bar some niche situations, such as sucking drones into you or creatures out of the ground with the shotgun type and wanting to unload mind control creatures with Creature to take on the much bigger and dangerous enemies, you’ll probably find yourself almost exclusively using the pistol type, Kenny. Kenny is the first unlocked and is realistically the main character alongside yourself. Voiced by Roiland, Kenny sounds very similar to Morty from Rick & Morty. For the first couple hours, this was funny and I thought the stuttering and awkward behaviour with snaps of psychosis were humorous.
Then the next few hours came through and it began to drain on me a bit. I would swap out to other guns just so I didn’t have to listen to Kenny constantly. But they were far less useful and I had spent far less credits on getting upgrades for them as they felt so much more niche. By the end of the game, after twists and turns, several boss battles and being told to stop trying to kill everyone by Kenny for eight hours, I was a little over the joke. This is a problem that High on Life has across the length of it.
The jokes are funny the first time you hear them. They are even funny the second and third time. After the seventh straight hour of hearing them, they aren’t funny anymore. The first time that Lizzie and Gus have a ten-minute argument and make you take sides (that has no actual impact on the story), it’s kind of funny. Awkward, but funny. The fact that this happens before and after almost every story mission, so it becomes so wildly frustrating as the game goes on. If you were to play the game in hour sessions, once a week, there is a potential that these jokes would maintain their humour. But as it stands, after six to seven hours straight there is no humour. The result is annoyance, frustration and a major desire to skip every single one of these forced interactions.
A game that touts the limitless possibility of warping around Space, with the ability to instantly warp something in from another place to wherever you are with a warp disc, I would have expected a decent amount of environments. In this case however, there is three major areas. Blim City, which is your major hub area with a small combat area attached in the Slums. Zephyr Paradise, which is a Jungle dense planet filled with sentient Teddy Bear people called Moplets. The final area being Port Terrene, which consists of a desert and then an underground crime city. That makes up the bulk of the game. Whilst there is a fair bit to explore in these areas, the problem remains. Space is infinite, large and you can walk through a warp door to end up anywhere that one exists on the other end.
Three areas, with 7 total bosses. Only one gets a unique area in Earth, that is only used as a linear set piece to build up to the final battle. The rest take you to one of the three major locations and that’s it. There is potential to flesh out the game far more and develop the fantasy space universe that is being created. Instead it feels like a decision to focus on three areas and make them feel alive was the outcome. If the game itself wasn’t so at risk of becoming ridiculously stale so quickly. The padding of what probably could have been a tight four-to-five-hour experience is forced out to a eight to ten hour experience by reusing of environments, repetitive jokes and forced over long interactions that have no impact beyond your own personal feeling on the situation.
Probably the most redeeming feature of the game is the boss fights themselves. Whilst not particularly difficult, the bosses all feel unique, have completely individual battles and really breathe some fresh air into the game. The final boss fight in particularly is interesting in that despite being given a ridiculously overpowered gun in Lezduit (who says LEZ-DUIT every time he recharges, because funny), still is quite difficult to battle. Bullet hells, unique mechanics, grappling mid fight to stay off the ground or avoid big attacks. Combining mechanics or building of a mechanic to make it even more dangerous as time progresses. The boss fights are fantastically built and getting to each one was what made trudging through the quickly overstaying humour.
High on Life is an interesting game. Whilst it realistically doesn’t really stand out in any way. It has that touch of Roiland and the Rick & Morty humour that people have come to really enjoy. Whilst a lot of jokes unfortunately overstay their welcome, for short bursts to unwind High on Life may actually be a great option. The gunplay feels good, and despite the set pieces being a little over long, the boss fights are major stand outs. There is a significant amount of collectibles to acquire, but the whole experience is going to round out around twelve hours at most. Enjoyment with High on Life is ultimately going to fall down to how you feel about Justin Roiland’s style of humour and how long you think you can do with the same one-note joke. A generally enjoyable experience that probably needed to explore more facets of itself to truly exceed.
The Score
7.0
Review code provided by Xbox
The Pros
-Some truly laugh out loud moments
-Gunplay feels good and challenging
-Entertaining and well-designed bosses
The Cons
-Over stays its welcome
-Too long for what it should be trying to achieve
-Irrelevant choices included to poke fun of choices in games
