3/5 ★ – ysobh's review of High on Life.

I have no idea whether High on Life is ultimately a good game or not, much like its art of style and sense of humour it is very messy and all over the place. I must admit to being a fan of Rick and Morty but that is in spite of Justin Roeland’s writing style more than a because. I always preferred Dan Harmon’s viewpoint on the show, especially since I followed him on from community. Justin is a damn talented voice actor, but I never fully embraced his sporadic joke delivery. The problem with Justin’s comedy is that it delivers so many jokes per second in the hopes that some of them will eventually land which smells a lot like gambler’s fallacy to me, but I will be the first to admit that the gaming medium might be prime real estate for that style of comedy. I have been losing interest in Rick and Morty with every passing season because I can feel Dan Harmon’s influence loosening and him only having the reins for a couple of big episodes a season, incidentally, these are where all the big and important character development happens. The problem with Justin’s comedy is that it sucks all the stakes and life out of a 20-minute show and because of their very high volume they outnumber everything else in the show, but games have struggled with comedy for generations (see the borderlands games that weren’t made by telltale) because put it simply the Achilles heel of comedy is repetition and modern games especially big budget ones live on repetition but with keeping a fresh and brazen pace with the joke delivery it manages to entertain for the entirety of its ten-hour campaign. Most of the jokes don’t land don’t get me wrong but enough do that you can forgive a lot of it. Some of the extended references are well done especially the doom one early in the game but some fall horribly. I think what carries the writing of the game is the wide cast of talking guns, by the end of the game I have grown to like the group dynamic and even chuckle at some of the jokes said. While it is not perfect and certainly not for everyone I see it as a positive step for both Justin and comedy in games as a whole regardless of how shaky the step is. I would most certainly be invested in the sequel they teased at the end and think they can learn a lot from this one. Notice how I didn’t mention the gameplay at all? Because to be honest that is what I disliked the most about the game. Let me get it out the way quickly the exploration is all right even if there is nothing to find except loot chests. The combination of jetpack and grapple hooking works for me, or I just like it because it reminds me of Journey to the savage planet, a slightly better game. The core combat loop is great, the guns are all fun to use and so are the special abilities. My main problem is that after experimenting early on in the game I found that the game is the most fun if you play it as a weird mix of movement and arena shooters. If you utilize all the guns and movement options at the same time and string them together you will have loads of fun, but the main issue of the combat is the game has no way of encouraging that playstyle, the enemies aren’t varied enough nor do they require any special technique to kill. The gun’s special abilities are only used for puzzle solving and are functionally identical in the end, you will always kill the enemy it just depends on the flavour of kill you want to use and how fast you want to get the job done. The game would have greatly benefited from an orthogonal approach to enemy design similar to the newer Doom games. To summarize, while I enjoyed my time with high on life, it is a skin-deep experience, me playing it on game pass most certainly made me have a more positive outlook on it. But it is certainly a game I will not think about again until a sequel is announced