High on Life doesn’t care whether you think it’s terrible, so why should I waste your time spelling it out? This is a vapid action game and an empty, ramshackle satire locked in a defensive crouch of indifference towards both your and its own existence. It views being played as an ordeal for all concerned: as one shopkeeper tells you the second you appear, “the longer you take in here, the longer I have to look like I give a shit”. Tallying its faults is giving High on Life more attention than the game proposes to deserve, so take the hint and click away. If you’re after a good quality self-aware videogame comedy, try Psychonauts instead or the caustic yet engrossing Battleblock Theater.
High on Life review
- Developer: Squanch Games
- Publisher: Squanch Games
- Platform: Played on Xbox Series X
- Availability: Out 13 December on Xbox One, Series X/S and PC
You insist on specifics – fine. This is a first-person platformer-shooter in which you play a burbanite kid turned bounty hunter, chasing down alien gangsters who have discovered that they can smoke human beings like pot. There’s a hub city with dimensional gateways to a handful of jungle or desert worlds, built around looping main paths with pop-up “kill till the music stops” enemy waves and the odd hidden collectible. Your guns are moderately upgradeable, Oddworld-style creatures who can speak, or at least swear.
Each gun has its own voice actor, and there’s a certain intrigue to hearing how each reacts to the same situation: primary handcannon Kenny, voiced by Squanch Games founder and Rick and Morty creator Justin Roiland, is basically Morty without the anxiety complex. They also shout in combat to let you know that altfire cooldowns have elapsed, and remind you of your objectives. But mostly, they spend the game telling you in various ways why the game sucks, as if this needed any elaboration.
The enemies are a watery mix of melee, midrange, sniper and midboss flavours; as Kenny frequently observes, they’re barely worth killing. The platforming sections are tolerable mostly thanks to the game’s generosity about respawning you on ledges when you tumble into acid lakes or bottomless pits. The satirical humour engulfing it all is an exercise in picking at taboos, ranging from casual gags about suicide to a knife called Knifey that loves knifing people (you know, in a sexual way). Everything is couched in the same spirit of evasive, poisoned irony: NPCs who tell you that they’re just here to deliver quest information, and a detective mode section which makes the case that detective mode sections are boring.