High On Life review – a joke of a game

High On Life – non-stop comedy (pic: Squanch Games)

GameCentral reviews the latest video game from Rick and Morty creator Justin Roiland, in the year’s most profanity-filled shooter.

Comedy has always had a place in video games, from Fallout’s bleak sense of humour to the unintended amusement of Skate 3’s ragdoll bugs, but games built around comedy are more of a rarity. They can also be distinctly hit or miss and for every South Park: The Fractured But Whole, which was both hilarious and a reasonably good game, there’s the likes of Saints Row and Borderlands, which are clearly trying to be funny but usually fail miserably.

High On Life is very clearly a product of the mind of Justin Roiland, the writer, voice actor, and animator behind the excellent Rick and Morty TV series, as well as VR game Trover Saves the Universe. High On Life’s title is entirely literal, given that the plot features aliens invading Earth in order to sell humans for use as drugs by their fellow extraterrestrials.

Your job is to stop them, a task that involves becoming a bounty hunter and shooting large numbers of aliens using a succession of sentient guns. The first, Kenny, is a wisecracking single shot pistol, whose secondary fire opens certain types of door. He’s swiftly joined by a chatty shotgun, an automatic pistol, a Halo-style needler, and another gun that fires its larval-stage young to devour baddies.

The final addition to your armoury is the most powerful but has the smallest magazine and arrives just before the final boss fight. All the weapons can be upgraded by implanting upgrade organs bought at the game’s pawnbroker, or found in chests, providing a much needed boost to their powers – because apart from Lezduit, the last gun you collect, all feel grossly underpowered.

That means the majority of enemies come across as major bullet sponges, which, especially at the start of the game when you only have the single shot pistol, creates a brutal and unwanted workout for your beleaguered trigger finger. It also makes some of the bosses a terrible chore to kill. The squish-ily inaccurate gunplay may be purposely organic, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that it’s not much fun.

The final element of your arsenal is a bloodthirsty Australian knife who just can’t wait to stab everything you meet; although he doesn’t get nearly as much dialogue as the guns, who usually have quite a bit to say. That can be a mixed blessing, because while the opening and a few discrete scenes are highly amusing – or at least they are if you enjoy Rick and Morty – a lot of the other dialogue feels part-improvised and in some cases is deliberately annoying for comic effect.

The game all too often becomes genuinely annoying. In one case you can eventually shoot and kill the extremely irritating over-vocalising alien, but much of the time you just have to sit and listen or walk away mid-flow. It’s nice to hear characters notice you wander off as they’re talking, and enough of them have lines to say when you do so that it was clearly an intended part of the gameplay.

Along with intentionally vexatious dialogue, there are also mini-games designed for futility. One in particular, where you’re charged with doing boring paperwork, seems to go on forever, to the point where you feel like the butt of the joke rather than its beneficiary. It’s an uncomfortable sense that unfortunately extends to large tracts of the game, whose overreliance on dull and imprecise gunplay increasingly feels like a bad joke at your expense.

You also can’t escape the sense that it feels like a VR title that’s been retrospectively shoehorned onto a flat screen. From the character selection, which sees you looking into a cocaine-laced mirror at the reflection of your selected avatar, to the sedately paced combat, to the brightly coloured yet simplistic looking graphics, High On Life looks and feels like a game built for VR.

High On Life – not a very good shooter (pic: Squanch Games)

Despite its low res looks, there are plenty of spectacular vistas to take in. The brightly coloured cyberpunk of its first open world area, the dusty Western-style saloon bars of its old town, and the various over-sized bosses, would all look even more affecting in VR, but still manage to convey considerable personality here.

The overall effect, however, is of a misfire. The relentless swearing starts to feel oddly forced long before the end of its 15-hour play time, and the patchiness of its humour starts to make many of its longer, less witty conversations feel like tests of patience, especially in the many cases when you can neither skip them nor run away.

You can’t argue the game isn’t trying to be different though. In your parents’ house, which acts as your home base, you can, if you like, sit down on the sofa and watch the entirety of 1994 cult non-classic Tammy and the T-Rex, a film starring Denise Richards as a girl whose boyfriend’s brain is implanted into an animatronic dinosaur.

In-game traversal is also weirdly joyous, your gore-obsessed knife acting as a part-time grapple hook, letting you swing along zip lines. The latter half of the game you’ll also have a jetpack, which when fully upgraded lets you fly quite significant distances. Both these facilities, you suspect, would be far better in VR, but they work fine on a flat screen.

If you love Roiland’s humour there are plenty of laughs in High On Life, perhaps even enough to get you through the long stretches of less funny dialogue, and wearying gunplay. If the comedy doesn’t work for you though, this will be a ghastly, entertainment void that seems to mock the very idea of enjoying it, and certainly can’t compete with a world of far more competent shooters.

Formats: Xbox Series X/S (reviewed), Xbox One, and PC
Price: £49.99
Developer: Squanch Games
Publisher: Squanch Games
Release Date: 13th December 2022
Age Rating: 16

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GameCentral reviews the latest video game from Rick and Morty creator Justin Roiland, in the year’s most profanity-filled shooter.