High On Life 2 review – a funny kind of first person shooter

Now that the day one patch has fixed most of the technical problems, GameCentral offers a final verdict on the Justin Roiland-less sequel to High On Life.

Humour isn’t an easy thing to get right, especially in in video games, where players have such a large influence on when and how they experience the action and the dialogue that punctuates it. Comic timing is hard when you might not be listening to or even looking at whoever’s trying to be funny. The first High On Life went full Rick and Morty, appealing directly to the show’s considerable following, and thanks to the involvement of its creator, Justin Roiland, the anarchic first person shooter was an instant hit.

Roiland also voiced the game’s first weapon. Because your protagonist was entirely mute, and each gun had its own distinct and exaggerated personality, they did all the talking for you, conversations changing radically depending on which gun you equipped. Since Roiland’s no longer involved with Squanch Games, his idiosyncratic vocal style and particular brand of brutal humour are also absent.

That gives High On Life 2 a different feel. For a start, it’s not as funny, with more of its bits landing with a wry smile rather than actual laughter, and long tracts of the game now relying on the boorish personalities of your weapons. While they certainly have their moments, they sometimes seem to rely on swearing as a substitute for jokes. It does manage to improve on the first game in some ways though, one being its more pointed satire.

In High On Life, aliens discovered they could smoke humans like pot and your character’s job was to gun down the galactic drug cartel responsible. In the sequel, humans are being farmed and turned into legally manufactured pills by an evil pharmaceutical conglomerate whose ruthless pursuit of profit, regardless of the human misery it causes, may not be too distant from actual big pharma.

Traversal has been streamlined with the addition of a skateboard. Now the sprint button hops you onto your board, letting you move faster and grind rails, something every environment in the game has plenty of. You also gain access to your knife’s grapple hook right at the start of the game, rather than towards the end. Along with your double jump and air dash, it makes getting around the game’s vertiginous, brightly coloured levels less painful than it could have been.

The final upgrade is to the gunplay. There was a lot wrong with High On Life’s shooting, from the apparent puniness of many of its weapons, to the annoyingly stodgy feel of aiming, and although the sequel improves on every aspect, it’s still some way short of being actively good. Despite being a first person shooter, its firefights are something to be endured rather than enjoyed, even if boss fights are occasionally more inventive.

You can tell Squanch knew things weren’t working properly because the game defaults to easy mode rather than normal. A quick experiment reveals why: in normal, fights are a mess. Enemies are inveterate bullet sponges and you regularly find yourself being killed by opponents you can’t even see. On easy, its untidy and defuse battles are at least manageable. The downside is that you’re practically invincible, making it feel as though little skill’s involved, the auto aim continually patronising you.

Puzzles, such as they are, are spelt out for you in the early part of the game, with both onscreen instructions and characters simply telling you what to do, often repeating themselves after a few seconds if you don’t act quickly enough. High On Life 2 emphatically isn’t a puzzle game, but it’s odd to include those elements, and then paper over them with overbearing announcements – the time it must have taken to add all that would have been better spent polishing the rest of its mechanics.

It also suffers from a clutch of technical issues. Until the day one patch arrived, an early boss fight was unplayable on PlayStation 5, crashing the console on every attempt. Even after the patch we soon found ourselves soft-locked after a Lugblob, one of High On Life 2’s grotesque key items, failed to spawn. Reloading the checkpoint and restarting the game didn’t help, although we did finally manage to glitch our way past it in what was clearly not the intended solution to the puzzle. Fortunately, that was the last significant problem in our playthrough.

Underneath its unrefined exterior, there’s a riot of offbeat and anarchic ideas, from its playable retro style arcade games to full length B-movies you can sit and watch; a boss that infiltrates your HUD and menus, forcing you to pause the game to fight him; and, of course, the absurdist weaponry. It’s even got an Agatha Christie style murder mystery. It’s just a shame they’re all so uninspiring to play.

High On Life 2 is frustratingly close to being a good game, but its rough edges predominate to the extent that they drown out much of the inventiveness. Shooting up groups of enemies just isn’t much fun, but neither are the minigames, and now that the dialogue isn’t as funny, there just isn’t enough joy to be had. With more polish those crazy ideas could really shine, but as it stands this feels more miss than hit.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC
Price: £49.99
Publisher: Squanch Games
Developer: Squanch Games
Release Date: 13th February 2026 (20/4 on Switch 2)
Age Rating: 18

Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter.

To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.

For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.

MORE: A Game About Digging A Hole reader review – Reader’s Feature

MORE: God Of War Trilogy Remake is a bad idea and makes me worry for the franchise – Reader’s Feature

MORE: Why did Sony and Valve fall out of love with making video games? – Reader’s Feature