Describing High on Life’s premise on paper is near impossible, but here goes…
You wake up in your room as a lazy teenager whose parents are out-of-town, with your sister barging in, snorting a line of what can only be caster sugar (trying to keep this PG), saying she’s throwing a party and needs your help getting things out of her car. You step outside, and immediately, a huge space-thingy warps in the middle of your street with a bunch of aliens charging out of it. While you hide behind her car, an alien is shot by one of his companions who quickly warps away, leaving you safe to walk over and pick up his gun. The gun then shoots juice at you, which provides you with the ability to understand and communicate with him. Immediately, he explains how your entire species is going to be turned into drugs by a dangerous cartel called the G3, and that you need to help him fight them, and escape to another planet before the Earth is destroyed.
If you retained any of that info, I’d say I did a decent job there, really.
High on Life is a game that exists. Despite how wacky and chaotic the game’s first few minutes must sound; I can’t say that I was really blown away beyond its opening section. As someone who was really anticipating its release after it’d been announced, by the time I’d got my hands on High on Life and completed my first playthrough, I was left thankful that the game was finally over, rather than craving any more content.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed playing it, and it isn’t at all an inherently ‘bad’ game, but for the majority of my playtime – there was nothing that really made the game feel all that special to me outside of there being a gun who had a voice similar to Morty from Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty.
The game is very Borderlands-esque, both humour and gameplay wise. To some people, that probably sounds amazing, but to others, alarming. I’m a pretty big Borderlands fan, so I didn’t find this to be the game’s biggest problem – but as with that style of comedy, often, there can be a fine line between jokes being amusing – and straight-up insufferable. High on Life certainly crossed this from time to time, and I’m sure this probably resulted in a lot of players getting sick of it after only a few hours.
The humour did get pretty irritating and repetitive after a while, even for me, but I stuck through seeing as I was almost finished with the game by the time that I truly wanted to turn it off. With that, High on Life didn’t overstay its welcome, as it only took me about eight hours to complete. The short length wasn’t to the game’s detriment, as the endless area clearing and boss-hunting would have become tiring had it been any longer.
On a more positive note, the voice-acting was top-notch, and all the Gatlians (which are the talking guns that you pick up throughout the game) had some superb voice actors and actresses who gave charming performances, which overall helped the game’s comedy feel less grating. Expectedly, Justin Roiland, who at the time of writing this has been dropped by Adult Swim, voiced multiple characters and used his iconic Morty inflection for your main Gatlian, Kenny. The recognisable voice of David Herman, most known for his work in Futurama and Bob’s Burgers for voicing Gene, as your bounty-hunting mentor, was a nice surprise.
I can give props to the developers at Squanch Games for making the effort to create a new IP, rather than taking what would’ve been the easier and more lucrative route, which would’ve been just simply developing a Rick and Morty game. Still, if you hate shows like Rick and Morty with a passion, or have grown tired of the show’s pointlessly crude jokes and style – I’d be confident to advise you not to play High on Life as it probably won’t be your cup of tea. On the other hand, if you’re like me and still enjoy watching the show every now and then, there’s no reason why the game wouldn’t be worth a shot.
The game isn’t without its problems – it’s almost too linear, feeling like less of an exciting open world you want to uncover and more of a cluster of areas you visit to defeat a boss once. High on Life is straightforward, and an amusing experience, but certainly isn’t memorable, and will likely gather dust on my shelf until I can be bothered to trade it in for a generous £1.50 at CeX in the future.
Rating: 3/5
Image Credits: Squanch Games
