High on Life 2 Review in Progress

What would come next after you’ve successfully taken down the biggest drug cartel in the galaxy, saving humanity ? Well, fame for you and your talking alien guns, some degree of fortune, your sister ending up in more trouble with aliens, and plenty more stabby bounty hunting, if the opening to High on Life 2 is anything to go by.

Through the first few hours of the game, it’s clear that High on Life 2 is picking up where the first game left off in terms of style and tone. Kenny the gun doesn’t make a return, obviously, and I feel that helps to take some of the edge off the improvisational humour. If that didn’t quite gel with you from the first game, it’s toned down a touch for the second and rebalanced to make some of the excesses feel a bit more optional. That said, this is still a motormouth first person shooter where your sentient guns are constantly jabbering away, where there’s long, drawn-out skits, and a cavalcade of bizarre alien characters, places and worlds.

You do have a bunch of returning characters, though, including Sweezy, Gus and Knifey remaining a part of your gang at the start of the game. It means you have a bit of rapid fire, shotgun-like blasting and brutally stabby melee in your arsenal right from the off. You can also drop Sweezy’s time bubble and shoot Gus’ blade disc as special abilities, while Knifey means you can latch onto grapple points to move around the fights rapidly. It provides a good foundation for what comes next, with new guns and more movement abilities.

Turns out some aliens still want to make humans into drugs, and as that’s revealed to you, you end up with a bounty being put on your head, forcing you to ditch your bounty hunter armour and start from scratch as an outlaw. But you do get a new skateboard, which is pretty neat.

As well as being a less strenuous replacement to sprinting everywhere, the skateboard has very simple controls and adds another aspect to the already fluid traversal. There’s a lot of the world that you can now grind along, latching onto handrails, sky rails, poles, wall edges and more with Knifey and then just rumbling along them. Spot a ramp and it can be used to launch you into a double jump, while halfpipes are easy to escape by just tapping a button to jump out of them.

It needs to be low effort, because it also ties into the combat in High on Life 2, which still provides countless goons for you to battle through, now coming from different bounty hunter gangs catching up to you. These encounters will often lock you down for an arena-style battle, each now with rails to grind around and keep you on the move. You don’t have to skateboard if you don’t like, and there’s still a lot of momentum through a fight as you dodge, shoot, use abilities and get stabby with finishers, but grinding on a rail can help you close or grow the gap to enemies pretty rapidly.

You’ll find a familiar structure to the game here, now with multiple hub worlds that then lead off to the different levels as you track down the bad guys. There’s some pretty wild diversions along the way, though. Even with the first baddie you’re after, you need to find a way to first get onto his cruise ship, which means befriending a lovelorn Gatlian through a long and messy drinking montage. Once you’re on the ship? Well, then there’s a murder mystery evening for you to try and solve, interrogating the other people taking part in the game, finding clues and piecing together the story.

If there’s one early criticism I have of this design, it’s that I wish I just had a compass with a marker on it to give me a direction. There’s a constant battle in game design between maps, objective markers and stripping everything away, and High on Life 2 will create a sparkly path for you to follow with a tap of a button… but that line disappears a few seconds later, and its pathing can be a bit obtuse to get you back to a main route. In this case a compass or a pointer on the threat radar feels like a better solution to give you a heading without spamming the sparkles.

We’ve still got the bulk of the game to go, but it already feels pretty clear where this game will land for people. If you enjoyed the first game and still adore Rick and Morty’s ad-libbed humour, then this is absolutely for you. This brings plenty more of that same tone, but there’s a sprinkling of new ideas and fun diversions that could make it appeal more broadly.

We’ll keep plugging away at the game over the next couple days to deliver our final scored review. Cheerio.