REVIEW: ‘High on Life 2’ Is Comedy Gold Marred By Technical Difficulties

High On Life 2 is a direct follow-up to Squanch Games’ High On Life, which was released in 2022. In the last game, you took down the G3 Cartel, looking to harvest humans for food, and kept humanity from going extinct, all while being a galactic bounty hunter.  

To kick off High On Life 2, you get a crash course in what’s happened since you saved the world. You see the dating show you went on, the fame you now have (which includes a great draw-a-self-portrait moment that carries through the game), and, well, the money. Then you realize that your sister Lizzie has a bounty on her head, and now you have to save her. 

In a human zoo, you’re on your way to rescue her and stumble across Rhea Pharmaceuticals’ plan for a new drug called Humanzipro.  Yes, the aliens want to consume humans again. Now, instead of a cartel, you’re taking on big pharma, and that’s a message we can all get behind. On this quest, you’ll track bounties across a galaxy’s biggest convention planet with just about a con for everything, a cruise ship, and even pet a human in a zoo, all of which have the right kind of pop culture flair. 

Squanch Games’ sequel has legs and a penchant for destruction. 

New to High Ob Life 2 are refined dialogue elements, including choices for the weapons in your hands, allowing you to respond to situations with input from your weapons’ very different personalities. It’s a good way to make dialogue moments more interactive than the last game, which helps alleviate the critique of constantly feeling like your Knife was interrupting every second of your game.

Here, the weapons have a purpose. While I can’t quite tell how different dialogue options impact the game’s narrative, with many of them feeling inconsequential in the long run, the choice itself helps make the story more tactile, especially with dialogue that can’t be skipped.

Another new addition to High On Life 2 is your skateboard. While your initial moments with the skateboard can feel out of place, once you get used to it, noticing the walls you can ride, the rails and ledges you can grind, greatly impact combat and boss battles, pushing you to use your environment just as much as your weapons. 

High On Life 2’s skateboard is game changing addition that never stops paying off. 

Additionally, integrating the skateboard into melee combat also allows you to diversify how you approach charging into a room. While you do need to allow your board to return to you after using it in battle, it almost becomes natural.

As a traversal mechanic, this addition adds new challenges to platforming, especially over large drops, and makes combat feel fast and dynamic. While the combat shines, the other gameplay elements lean into what is Squanch Games’ biggest strength: humor.  

One of the easiest ways to sum up High On Life 2 is to summarize some of the absolutely insane things that you get to do in it. To kick things off, quite literally, one of the first environmental interactions you encounter is a human in a petting zoo. 

No, not a human visiting an animal or alien petting zoo, but a section of a zoo dedicated as a human petting zoo. It’s a weird dialogue exchange made weirder when you reach into the pin and scratch behind the human’s ear. In another mission, you kill aliens and try to secure a space for your team to land.

That’s the more robust way to put it, when in reality you’re really just fighting for a parking spot in a parking garage that is a literal warzone, or your local outdoor mall on Black Friday weekend. Not only is this joke part of the mission oddly fun, but it’s also incredibly frantic, so it’s hard to pull your attention away from the game, in the best way.

Comedy is Squanch Games’ biggest strength. 

High on Life 2 excels in its comedy. Despite the many technical issues, it was hard to put the game down once I came back to it because humor has been woven into almost every aspect of the game experience. With humor akin to one of my favorite titles last year, Revenge of the Savage Planet, there isn’t a single space that doesn’t include a piece of a pop culture cornerstone or joke. 

The use of recognizable real-world elements throughout the game, like Hall H, a Jurassic Park-themed human zoo, and the very first mission after you rescue your sister taking you to a Spencer’s in a mall, it’s hard not to smile throughout the game. Even the carpet choices, in-world ads, or posters all come together like a curated capsule of comedy, no matter where you’re looking or exploring. 

But the best example of High on Life 2 is going above and beyond when it comes to comedy, which is when you’re asked to sign a waiver for MurderCon. Early on in the campaign, you go to what is essentially a con planet where all cons are happening at one time. One of them is all about murdering everyone else attending. To enter, you sign your name with the sticks. And if you’re like me, well, you draw a wiener. 

Yes, there is an achievement for drawing a wiener in High On Life 2, well, kind of.

The funniest part of this wasn’t that I was able to draw one, but that an achievement popped up for drawing that wiener. Called “Was That a Weiner?,” the achievement then said, “We can’t actually tell if you drew a wiener. But if you did, this is probably a little funny.” I laughed for a solid few minutes after that, telling everyone I could. 

Still, the joke keeps going once you enter the arena section, where you’re tasked with making it to the top of the leaderboard by murdering everyone you see. The signatures are used as the photo icons, which meant that if you drew a wiener, that was your icon on the leaderboard. 

The thoughtfulness in pulling one joke through multiple elements and trusting that it would pay off is one of the strongest elements of High on Life 2 and this is far from the only example. A joke isn’t just a joke for the team at Squanch games, they’re central to the game itself. 

Additionally, the writing in High On Life 2 has also shown immense growth from the first game in the series. With criticisms of how frequently the weapons talked and how intrusive the jokes were at times, it has to be noted that in this sequel, everything is pulled back without pulling any punches. 

High On Life 2 avoids the pitfalls of its predecessor when it comes to writing and combat.

The weapons feel have more well-rounded personalities because you’re not forced to hear them over and over, and they contribute to conversations with specific personal elements that add to the comedy without oversaturating the audio. It’s a more tailored version of the first game’s humor, honed and thoughtfully executed, that makes it all work. High On Life 2 is easily one of the funniest video games I’ve ever played.

That said, High On Life 2 has two major misses that I can’t ignore. The first is how often you get stuck in extremely slow conversations that exist only to crack a joke before letting you engage with the world. This sticks out like a sore thumb, particularly when you are in situations where you were freely moving just moments before.

With skateboard traversal being one of the most fun aspects leveling up High On Life 2’s platforming, each dialogue moment that was either incidental or a part of the story started feeling like hitting speedbumps. The pace switch is jarring, to the point that during extended play sessions, I would just simply get annoyed. This annoyance is compounded by the lack of a skip option for NPC dialogue.

Despite the quick -paced combat and traversal mechanics, High On Life 2’s pacing struggles thanks to locking players in dialogue.

While I appreciate the comedy in this game, I don’t want to stop and sit for minutes listening to a meandering dialogue line that may get a giggle when I am trying to progress. Locking players into story-important elements is a-okay, but making me suffer through every offhand comment from NPCs is just too much. In fact, at a certain point, I just stopped trying to talk to anyone at all if I could avoid it.

The second issue with High on Life 2 is technical. Multiple times in boss fights, my weapons would completely disappear. I would be in the middle of shooting, my shield would break, and then everything would be gone.

The shots were audible, but any sort of visual element from the weapons would be gone. It made getting through bosses a pain and ruined the excitement of getting a new gun. This ruined the entire experience of collecting the first gun, so I just turned the game off immediately. 

My frustration ceiling is pretty high, particularly because of my love for soulslikes, but the amount of technical difficulties stopped any joy. This is doubled because of how easy it is to get stuck in places on different maps.

Technical issues mar what would otherwise be a great experience with High On Life 2.

While visual glitches like ending up under the map for a split second while taking an elevator are forgivable (this happened a lot), it’s how often I would get stuck while exploring that took too long to maneuver my way out by trying to exploit different surfaces. 

The worst one came quickly after I started playing, when I accidentally found a door on a cliff in the Human Zoo and couldn’t get back up because the area was locked. In an attempt to rectify the situation, I restarted the checkpoint, only to wind up in exactly the same spot. It was something I couldn’t figure out and just decided to throw away the save and start the game entirely over. 

While none of the other times I got stuck were as detrimental as the first, they were time-consuming enough that it just felt like running into a wall over and over again. High On Life 2 felt like it was constantly reprimanding me for exploring and moving quickly, despite the game’s core mechanics pushing me to do just that.

But in the end, High On Life 2 is comedy gold.

High On Life 2 winds up an oddity. When it comes to gameplay, narrative, and comedy, it improves on its predecessor. But when it comes to performance, it was difficult to get into a stride, especially when the game is only around 12 hours long (15 if you’re a completionist).

Without my gripes, this would have been a game I would have played through in two sessions, particularly because of how much it kept me laughing. It’s probably better to say that this was a game I wanted to be obsessed with and not put down, but I just kept hitting my frustration ceiling in a way I didn’t expect. 

Ultimately, though, High on Life 2 is an improvement on the first and one hell of a time. The humor shows just how much in-tune the writers at Squanch Games are with their players, and that speaks volumes. With dynamic traversal via sick tricks on a skateboard and fun combat mechanics unique to each gun, there is a lot to learn and a lot to play with in High on Life 2, making it a good time even through its complications. 

High On Life 2 is available now on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5.