There’s an old refrain among comedians that no joke survives its retelling, and you don’t need to look any further than the shoddy track record of comedy movie sequels to see the truth in that. Fortunately, funny video games tend to fare much better, from Borderlands 2 to Portal 2, and so you would hope that a weird, deeply inappropriate game about drugs and talking guns like High On Life 2 might enjoy the same kind of evolution. In some ways it does just that, with many of its existing bright spots shining even more brightly – the lovable weapons that serve as your companions are more amusing than ever, and movement outside of combat is greatly improved by radical new skateboarding mechanics. But other areas don’t hold up as well, like the significantly less polished story, jokes that don’t land quite as often, and performance issues that are even more shaky than the first game. I still enjoyed my time with High On Life 2, and truly relish the opportunity to return to a world this goofy any chance I get, but this is definitely closer to Zoolander 2 than 22 Jump Street.
High On Life 2 picks up right where our foul-mouthed cast of characters left off… sort of. After a dizzyingly fast intro recaps the events of the first game and gets you back into the action, you find yourself on the wrong side of the law and ready to begin the familiar process of hunting down a list of baddies to bring down an evil organization. Instead of a drug cartel, this time the villain comes in the form of a pharmaceutical company that I felt no guilt killing off members of over the course of the roughly 10-hour campaign, now playing the role of rogue assassin as I ply my trade of death illegally – a nice twist to the otherwise nearly identical setup of the original.
Sadly, the story built around this string of over-the-top murder missions is a bit sloppy, with a couple big reveals that don’t really land and a surprising number of monologues to explain motives and technologies. There’s a shocking amount of “tell, don’t show” for a game that is typically very intentionally about not sweating the details and following the rule of cool. It sorta reminds me of a D&D campaign that’s gone on way too long and starts to feel like the DM is twisting himself in knots trying to get to that cool payoff, missing the mark too often in the process. The good news is that the plot at least moves along at a pretty fast clip with a steady stream of silly gags to keep you guessing, even when the story gets messy.
Speaking of silly gags, like its predecessor, this is an adventure that relies a whole lot on the success of its goofiness and whimsy, and there are plenty of laugh out loud moments to be had. The high points are extremely memorable, like when you fight an incredibly annoying boss who transports himself inside your menus and starts messing with your game settings (appropriately voiced by the legendary Richard Kind), or when one mission concludes with a murder mystery that has you gathering clues and interrogating witnesses instead of shooting guns. Sometimes the lowbrow humor also just hits, like a side quest where someone wanted me to help them find a bridge troll and…y’know, I think I’ll just leave it at that. High On Life 2 is at its best when it’s trying weird and creative things, and when it manages to pull that off, there’s really nothing quite like it.
That talking Aussie blade cuts both ways though, as jokes fall flat a tad too often in this sequel, and it’s pretty tough to watch when they do. Granted, it’s always harder to pull off gags in a world that has had a lot of its juice squeezed out already – we know about the species of sentient guns, for example, and have already had most of the funny moments we’re going to get out of that surreal experience – but some of the jokes are quite literal repeats of things that happened in the first game. If I was having the most fun when High On Life 2 was trying new stuff, I was having the least when it was retreading old bits or just throwing a couple curse words onto the end of a sentence in lieu of actual punchlines.
The stars of the show in the original were the gun companions you met and befriended along the way, and that certainly remains true in this follow-up. Meeting a down on his luck pistol named Travis (who has a charmingly dorky voice from Ken Marino) and reuniting him with his estranged wife is both a satisfying arc and a clever way to introduce the first dual-wielded weapon when his spouse joins the party (I do wish they’d make out less though). All four of the new gun companions are awesome and have helpful abilities in both combat and puzzle-solving, like Sheath, whose harpoon “trick hole” attack can impale people during fights and create ziplines while platforming. Plus, most of the OG Gatlians make a return as well, including my favorite partner in crime (literally this time), Gus, the shotgun who looks like a frog and has the unmistakable voice of J.B. Smoove. Hell yeah.
Unfortunately, a wider variety of guns hasn’t done much to make the sloppy and overly simplistic gunplay any better – in fact it even feels a touch worse. Some of the new weapons are quite crisp compared to the wonky slugthrowers of yore, especially Sheath’s burst-fire that reminds me of the battle rifle from Halo. But with so many enemies and projectiles flying around, claustrophobic rooms with odd geometry that enemies get caught behind and within, and weapon accuracy being a bit all over the place, combat leans into chaos more than anything else. Most of the time that’s fine because you’re playing a game that’s all about over-the-top nonsense, but when you occasionally die due to unfair circumstances or when a fight drags on for a bit too long, it can kill the mood. To its credit, the enemy variety is mostly decent, with a stream of ugly new creatures to blast apart introduced at a steady clip, from flying robotic freaks to spooky, scary skeletons – but if you were looking for a polished FPS with gunfights that feel at all coherent, look elsewhere.
The biggest and most interesting change with High On Life 2 is mobility, as you’re given a trusty skateboard in the opening minutes that serves as your travel companion throughout the adventure. Instead of fighting on foot, most encounters highly encourage or outright require you to be grinding on rails, riding on the sides of walls, and soaring through the air on your skateboard. When it comes to traveling from place-to-place or navigating your way through platforming sections, this is pretty awesome, and a shocking amount of your time will be spent rolling around like you’re playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. I didn’t really expect the skateboard to play such a big role, but honestly I can’t imagine going back to the relative sluggishness of running around on foot.
In combat, the skateboard’s influence isn’t so positive. You’re seemingly expected to never stop moving while fighting hordes of aliens, which makes the already chaotic encounters even more noisy and hard to read. Many fights take place in open areas where you’re surrounded by more bad guys than you could possibly keep track of, and staying put is a death sentence with so little cover, so you’ll have to take shots at passersby while leaping from various parts of the environment to keep yourself going as fast as you can. Combine that juggling act with slippery weapons, enemies that teleport around, and weird foes that are often hard to even understand what you’re looking at, and oh boy, the result is just an absolute diarrhea of pixels.
Those pixels seem to be pushing High On Life 2 to its limits as well, because I saw frequent framerate dips (some that caused my screen to freeze for several seconds before getting it together) and progress-hindering bugs that required me to reload the last checkpoint. Developer Squanch Games did include “various performance issues across the game” on a list of known problems with the review build that will apparently be addressed by a patch, but it didn’t specify the extent to which those would be resolved – and in my experience, a day-one patch rarely makes all of a game’s performance problems magically disappear when they are this extensive. Nothing I saw struck me as game breaking beyond a simple reset, but it was consistent and egregious enough to make me worried for the stuff people will find when this is out in the wild.
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