High on Life Review – IGN
They say that tragedy + time = comedy, but in gaming the real tragedy is the amount of time we have to wait between quality comedy games. Thankfully, in the opening moments of High on Life, as my talking gun belittlingly whispered to me that I was doing a great job as I shot dancing aliens in the face, I got the feeling I’d struck gold. While it has bugs and performance hitches and occasionally frolics in unimpressive toilet humor, it largely succeeds at being the type of absurd space satire I’ve always wanted.
Whether I was chatting with my shotgun about the merits of science and formulas, covering myself in alien poop to sneak into a secure facility, or inexplicably watching a full live-action movie from the ‘90s on nearby television, High on Life is a game that just knows how to have a good time, and there really aren’t enough of those.
This delightfully inappropriate first-person shooter puts its comedic premise and characters front and center and absolutely refuses to take itself seriously. After Earth is taken over by disgusting aliens who kidnap humans to be smoked as hallucinogenic drugs, you begin a ridiculous space odyssey to get revenge against the extraterrestrial drug cartel responsible. All the while, you’re accompanied by the stars of the show: the extremely rude weapons themselves, who serve not only as your tools of destruction, but as the story’s most important characters.
These animate weapons (called Gatlians) are easily the best part of the adventure, and include Kenny, the easily flustered pistol that’s basically Justin Roiland doing his usual Rick & Morty thing, Sweezy, the foul-mouthed sniper rifle that seems to be a reference to Halo’s Needler, Creature, who shoots uses his rapidly gestating children as ammo, and my personal favorite: Gus, the surprisingly wholesome shotgun voiced by Curb Your Enthusiasm’s JB Smoove.
While some took a while to earn my love, spending an entire 16-hour journey with these guys held up right to my face ended up being a fantastic excuse for lots of amusing dialogue and character development. By the time the credits rolled, I really didn’t want to have to put my new best friends back in their holsters.
That’s due in large part to High on Life’s mostly solid writing, which piles on dumb gags, curse-laden rants, and lots of TV screens airing idiotic shows that look like they could have been pulled straight from one of Rick & Morty’s Interdimensional Cable episodes. One level features an intentionally irritating alien who follows you around and rambles on, seemingly without end, until you finally unlock the ability to murder him dead. Another makes you go to Space Applebee’s and have a full meal for no apparent reason.
You can also find a movie theater playing the real-world movie from 1990, Demon Wind, complete with Mystery Science Theater 3000-like commentary via some nearby aliens, which you’d better believe I watched in its entirety. The campaign is only about eight hours long if you have the willpower and focus to ignore all of these delightful distractions and power through, so naturally my first playthrough took me over 16 hours, specifically because I was goofing off for so much of it.
The entire thing is just packed with so much silliness and it’s always exciting to spend time planet-hopping through it; I never knew when I might run into something insane, like when I teleported a stretch of freeway onto a jungle planet and watched the occupants of the cars who’d been taken with it slowly devolve from a group of aliens with road rage into an insane cult that sacrificed their own to appease the asphalt gods.
It’s impressive that an FPS so ridiculous also has a lot of heart.
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A lot of the jokes in High on Life are either lowbrow or sophomoric, or pearl-clutchingly irreverent, and like pretty much all comedy it won’t work for everyone. But as a fan of classic comedy games like Borderlands 2 and South Park: The Stick of Truth, it definitely worked for me. There were moments where all the cursing and shock humor felt lazy or a bit much – and that’s coming from someone with an extremely high tolerance for it – but more often than not the silly bits and crass dialogue land.
It’s just hard not to chuckle when the grunt enemies stop in the middle of combat to disrespectfully twerk in your direction, y’know? It’s impressive, though, that in a shooter so ridiculous and purposefully flippant with its setting, High on Life’s story ends up having a lot of heart. I genuinely enjoyed bonding with the washed-up bounty hunter turned mooch couch-crasher, Gene, and I felt real motivation to destroy the alien drug cartel – though mostly to get payback for my Gatlian buddies, not to save the human race.
High on Life
In perfect harmony with High on Life’s completely chaotic vibe, slinging your companion guns in firefights is over-the-top and occasionally a bit messy. Weapons are somewhat inaccurate and enemies flop around the battlefield shooting gloop at you, and in the opening hours I worried there would be little more to combat than using pea shooter Kenny to mop up brainless ants.
It doesn’t help that, even on the hardest difficulty, High on Life is almost always incredibly easy to get through – you’re given ample opportunity to restore your health and shield, and incoming bullets are almost always slow enough to be easily avoided. Luckily, once you gain some new tools like the jetpack or other interesting combat options (like Creature’s power to mind-control enemies on the battlefield or Gus’ ability to suck up smaller bad guys right in front of him and then blast them to bits) things get a lot more interesting.
There’s still plenty to shake a fist at though, like how weak the enemy variety is, or how hostile aliens occasionally get stuck inside the environment, or the incredibly perplexing decision to make the down button on the d-pad the default button for crouch button (you can rebind this in the Ease of Access section of your Xbox settings menu). These things certainly don’t make for the smoothest combat experience, and the fun comes from finding creative ways to clear each area of baddies.
Like how you can use Kenny’s glob shot ability to toss enemies in the air then juggle them with bullets until they explode, or how you can kill enemies that are behind cover (or stuck in the environment) by using Sweezy’s object-piercing shots. It’s definitely more chaotic and less finely tuned than your ideal shooter, but it’s a pretty good sandbox for pulling off stupid and amusing kills, and that sorta jives well with High on Life’s energy.
This is a pretty good sandbox for pulling off amusing kills.
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When your guns aren’t shooting at things, they make trusty allies for getting through each level using their alternate-fire modes – horrifyingly named their “trick hole” – which gives them functionality beyond killing things. Kenny can knock obstacles out of the way with his Glob Shot, Gus can create platforms by shooting his spinning blades into walls, Sweezy can shoot bubbles that slow time in a given area, and more. I was pleasantly surprised at how fun it was to just run around searching for collectibles and hidden loot boxes.
In Metroidvania fashion, as you unlock weapons and abilities you’ll gain access to new areas and secrets in locations you’ve already visited, which makes backtracking a worthwhile use of time. Collecting alien Pesos by exploring is fairly rewarding too, as you can use said space currency to buy upgrades for your weapons and bounty hunting suit, which give useful perks like an upgraded version of Gus’ enemy-sucking ability that lets him tear off their armor and give it to you.
High on Life also has some crazy and memorable boss fights which serve as loopy crescendos to each level and have you facing down an alien criminal of one persuasion or another. Not only are these fights the only parts where I felt legitimately challenged during combat, but the bosses you fight and the inane things they have you do are almost always fantastic punchlines to whatever that bad guy’s whole deal was.
So much so, in fact, that I actually felt kinda sad about having to viciously slaughter them. In one boss fight, the bad guy punished me in a way that made me have to pause for a bit and allow myself to laugh at the meta humor of it – it’s the kind of dastardly attack I could never have seen coming.
When you first start it up, High on Life gives you another bit of meta-humor: a disclaimer warning that “Any glitches or bugs you may encounter are intentional satirical references to other games with glitches and bugs.” That joke didn’t make me laugh as much as I played, because it really is prone to bugs and performance issues that, while rarely bad enough to put a halt to the good times, were a regular irritation.
At the time of this writing, a performance patch has been deployed that appears to have fixed the worst of the issues, but in times of extreme stress like a few of the more elaborate boss fights, I am still seeing some minor framerate dips playing on an Xbox Series X. As for the bugs, they’re usually minor annoyances like the time I had a character lock up on me so I couldn’t advance dialogue with him until I reloaded my save, or when a few enemies continued to stand around as intangible beings after I killed them.
