Once you get past the initial weirdness of a universe where guns can talk and a collection of advanced alien races can turn human beings into recreational narcotics, 2022’s High on Life was a pretty straightforward adventure. It was pretty consistently funny, and some of the visual and verbal gags were enough to elicit double-takes if you weren’t quite paying attention. High on Life 2 suffers a little from sequel-itis, then, in the respect that we’ve already been served the biggest punchline of them all, and yet it still manages to come at you with the odd disarming joke.
Interestingly, it doesn’t begin with your mute hero being stripped of all the powers and weapons they had in the first game. In fact, they’ve been busy, as a breakneck intro reveals. After becoming famous for wiping out the entire G3 drug cartel and saving humanity, they became the number one bounty hunter in the galaxy, and were elevated to celebrity status. So when the next bounty happens to be for their revolutionary sister, they have to make a choice: kill her, or turn their back on the Bounty Hunter Code. You can guess which is the canonical choice.
You’re no longer taking out intergalactic drug-dealers, but rather Big Pharma itself, as a much more legit and above-board company called Rhea Pharmaceuticals has found a way to make actual medicine out of people, and is trying to pass a law that makes it fully legal to farm human beings for the mass-market. It’s the same premise with different colours, sure, but it does present an alternate viewpoint on High on Life 2’s galactic community at large which I really appreciated.
Initially you’ll have just three weapons: foul-mouthed machine pistol Sweezy, who can create time bubbles to slow enemies; smooth-talking shotgun Gus who can create platforms and perform trickshots; and Knifey, who’s, well, a knife. His special power is pretty simple: he dismembers stuff and laughs maniacally while doing it. As the game progresses you’ll add more to your repertoire, including a pair of over-amorous married weapons that allow you to dual-wield.
What High on Life 2 still excels at is low-brow comedy. It’s not always gold, and in fact many of the jokes feel like slight variations on old favourites, but the performances are top-notch and the often unexpected nature of the quickfire gags mean you’ll miss one or two out of every ten that simply don’t land. I did really enjoy wasting time watching some of the movies Gene spends time ogling in the hub, though, and if you go upstairs to the quarters you’ll find a TV playing several classic toy commercials that took me for a spin down memory lane, real or not.
The combat is pretty solid, though, even if it’s quite straightforward for a shooter. Each gun having a secondary fire mode mixes things up a little, but enemies haemorrhage health and shield refills like fountains so you won’t often find yourself in trouble. Traversal, too, is mostly pretty simple, with a tether for zipping about and a double-jump in your repertoire.
Without a doubt, the biggest addition is the skateboard, though. Acquired early on, you’ll whip the skateboard out every time you press sprint, and can then grind rails or skate up curved surfaces with ease. It’s fluid and fun, even if it can sometimes be a hindrance. A lot of the fights have an enclosed arena set up with enemies that fly, leap, or charge you, and it’s not always easy to get a bead on them when you’re also moving fast. You can use the board offensively by launching it at enemies, but I find it to be incredibly unreliable as a weapon.
While it is a pretty basic FPS, High on Life 2 still presents a really good-looking, wilfully bizarre world to explore and occasionally throws something completely unexpected at you. Case in point is a fourth-wall-breaking boss who pulls some Psycho Mantis bullshit on you and literally invades your menu, which leads to some really cool shenanigans that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before. Though, playing on PC with the game in the state it was pre-launch, a boss hitting me with a fake factory-reset was almost a gag too far.
Because the performance in this game really is the biggest boss you’ll face. I struggled to play it on PC, even after dropping the video settings to something that wouldn’t trouble a Gameboy Advance. After switching to PS5 and benefitting from a few more patches, it became much more playable, with only minor visual glitches and some odd corpse physics, and none of the terrifying screen-freezing of the PC version. It may well be patched up quite a bit now even on PC, but it’s worth noting if that’s your platform of choice.
It would be nice if High on Life 2 does well enough to warrant more games set in this universe, as, despite some of the comedy losing its shock value, it’s still a really likeable, highly irreverent setting with more to offer than just dick jokes and non-stop pop culture references (seriously, there’s a ton of them). It may not take us to places that we haven’t already seen, but it’s the journey that counts, and High on Life 2 is still a wild, colourful, intentionally silly ride.
