High on Life 2 review - skateboard-powered sequel is much easier to like than its painful predecessor
Consider our differences squanched.
I cannot stress how much I detested High on Life when its loser-ass jiggled out of its mum's basement in a suffocating cloud of weed-smoke. Squanch Games' 2022 FPS was a cynical, jabbering mess that overcompensated for its limp gunplay with meandering, interminable stoner humour. Eurogamer's High on Life review rightly lambasted it for its failings, and I personally would have been happy to never look at one of its grinning guns ever again.
At the same time, I believe in second chances, and High on Life 2 is at least a partial vindication of that belief. While I wouldn't say all is forgiven after our disastrous first date, Squanch Games has clearly been working on itself over the last three years. High on Life 2 is friendlier, funnier, and faster on the trigger than it was on our first outing. It's also become really effing good at skateboarding, which is unexpected but kinda hot.
Reprising your role of adolescent intergalactic bounty hunter, High on Life 2 kicks off with a playable montage of the events following your victory over the drug-dealing G3 cartel, which sought to corner the market in human-based narcotics. Rescuing humanity from the bottom of alien bongs has catapulted you to celebrity status, and High on Life 2's opening sequence flicks through your subsequent talk-show appearances, hover-limo rides, and battles against alien kaiju with impressive efficiency.
High on Life's high life is clearly wearing on your character, so it's something of a relief when a chance encounter with your sister (now a self-made resistance fighter) course-corrects you onto a new mission – taking down the ringleaders of Rhea Pharmaceutical. The galaxy's biggest drug manufacturer plans to get humans reclassified from illegal drug to medicinal pill, a move that would spell doom for the species… again.
While hardly a sophisticated satire of Big Pharma, the switch yields a more interesting series of objectives than before. High on Life 2 sees you taking down eccentric billionaires, mad scientists, corrupt politicians and literal finance wizards in an array of colourful missions.
The highlight of these is ConCon, where you're tasked with assassinating the unfortunately named Muppy Doo – Rhea's biggest political supporter – on a planet that's basically Coruscant for conventions. Every activity imaginable has its own celebratory event on ConCon, from politics to murder. Even parking for the conventions is its own, brutally competitive festival, as drivers from across the galaxy compete for the best parking spots in a deadly game that combines musical chairs with vehicular manslaughter.
From this opening parking-lot brawl to its fourth-wall breaking finale, ConCon showcases High on Life 2 at its most accomplished. Not every mission is so successful – a mid-game scenario where you infiltrate a cult in the Wyoming countryside suffers from staid level design and an overlong boss fight – but unlike the first game, High on Life 2 doesn't run out of imaginative steam halfway through, delivering new ideas into its final hour.
Even its least interesting locations are elevated by the sequel's biggest new feature – the skateboard. There's something mildly miraculous in how Squanch integrates skateboarding into both platforming and combat. By combining simplified controls that focus on ollies, wall-rides and glue-on grinding with more traditional action-game manoeuvres like a double jump and air-dash, Squanch produces a movement toolset that facilitates thrilling acrobatics without knotting your fingers together. Bunny-hopping across lines of hovering traffic in ConCon is tremendously satisfying, as is knocking down enemies by ollie-ing into their faces.
The breeziness of the skateboarding is complemented by High on Life 2's broader adjustment in tone. Put simply, its writing is significantly less annoying than the first game. It's less crass, less misanthropic, less prone to adlibs that run on for far too long. In its place is a more sincere attempt to get you to bond with your talking arsenal. This is most successfully achieved with Travis, your new pistol who you meet in the depths of a self-pitying spiral after falling out with his weaponised wife, Jan. Over the course of several missions, their turbulent relationship is explored in noisy, but well-observed fashion, while Travis' lame-duck persona is the foundation of some fun jokes.
While a big improvement, I still think High on Life 2's humour falls short of games like Psychonauts 2 or Thank Goodness You're Here. The gap between word count and jokes that land is still too wide for my liking, and it still occasionally does that thing where an NPC obstructs you while constantly chittering about it. Nonetheless, the reduced hostility makes it easier to forgive High on Life 2 when the humour doesn't land, and there are good gags within the voluminous script. A late-game joke about stealth mechanics gave me a good chuckle, as did a running joke about one of your weapons' resemblance to a certain Star Wars character.
High on Life 2's biggest problem is that its primary mechanic – shooting – remains its weakest element. Again, it's a better FPS than Squanch's first attempt. The enemies are more varied and interesting, the skateboard adds versatility in navigating arenas, and your arsenal has been expanded with a couple of interesting firearms. These include a composite bow that can create dimensional rifts to shoot through, and an assault rifle voiced by Ralph Ineson (which is a back-of-the-box feature in and of itself.)
The problem is that it's all still too floaty and insubstantial, lacking that audio/visual kick that's fundamental to a great shooter. Melee attacks still feel like you're wafting Knifey in front of you rather than slicing your enemy's throat. Juggling enemies with the glob shot is still clumsy and of questionable tactical advantage, while Assault Ralph's sonorous voice is not matched by the pathetic pew of his projectiles.
Ultimately, when your shotgun fizzles rather than booms, you've got problems, no matter how meticulously animated its face is. Indeed, much as I enjoy the skateboard's presence, it ultimately serves to distract you from the problems with High on Life 2's combat rather than actually solving them. Sure, being able to launch my skateboard into an opponent's teeth is a fun mechanical flourish. Would I swap this for a shotgun that rattles your soul when you pull the trigger? Without hesitation.
There are other lingering issues too. The music is still hideous; a tuneless electronic wail that's less an earworm and more an ear infection. The voice acting remains a mix of genuinely excellent performances and oddly flat delivery. There's still an inexplicably huge open-hub area that gives you little impetus to explore it, and I can't help but feel those resources would be better spent on one or two more high-concept missions.
Finally, the version of High on Life 2 I played suffered from several major bugs. The most notable of these prevented me from talking to key characters outside of cutscenes, essentially skipping all of their dialogue. This didn’t seem like it would be too much of a problem until I found myself having to solve a murder in the game's first act, wherein said bug prevented me from interrogating any of the suspects. As it happens, I still managed to correctly identify the killer, so just call me Lieutenant Sherlock Poirot from now on.
Regardless, I came away from High on Life 2 pleasantly surprised. Not mesmerised. Not blown away. But also not wishing I could charge Justin Roiland for 15 of the sorriest hours of my life. I won't speculate on how Roiland's departure from Squanch affected the trajectory of the sequel. But from an outside perspective, High on Life 2 has grown up in mostly the right ways, while retaining enough of its goofball personality to be a good hang when it counts. Is it love? Not quite. But I wouldn't kick it out of bed either.
A copy of High on Life 2 was provided for this review by Squanch Games.