You know those episodes of Rick & Morty where nothing really happens, but you just go along with it because the jokes are funny and you like the characters? High on Life is like that, except the jokes aren’t funny and I hate the characters. It’s an extremely derivative video game that relies on conventions that were outdated ten years ago. It’s functionally fine minute to minute, but you’d be better off playing anything else.

High on Life feels like the development cycle involved taking all the money, time, and effort that might have gone into gunplay, level design, quest writing, traversal, and world building and shunted it into writing jokes. Most of these jokes don’t land, so then what are you left with? It’s like it just grabbed a game to copy then let Justin Roiland do some improv over the top of it. Unfortunately, that game was Journey to the Savage Planet.

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I considered comparing it to Ratchet & Clank, which it obviously aspires to be, but they aren’t even in the same galaxy. It wants to be Ratchet in the same way Hoops wants to be Rick & Morty. Its whole gimmick (the talking guns) leads to a severely limited arsenal, gameplay is sluggishly slow when it should be breezy, and the first-person platforming is a nightmare of poor puzzles and awful perspective. I keep going back to the dead on arrival jokes, but that’s not the only thing that makes High on Life a huge whiff.

High on Life main character pointing a gun at a kid

The gameplay is bafflingly simple. I kept expecting it to open up, but it never did. You start off, after some preamble, as a bounty hunter with a target. You kill them, you get two more targets. Kill them, two more. Kill them, two more. Then the game’s over. You can revisit old planets, and upgrades like jet packs might let you reach a chest full of coins now, but there’s no real reason to retrace your steps and the path never gets any wider. It’s all murda murda kill kill, and that’s just the punchlines.

Maybe I’d put up with a surface level game if it was funny. I don’t like the trend of increasingly dark (visually and narratively) third person adventures being the only measure of a good game these days, and High on Life’s colourful world and creatively wacky characters are a break from that. Enemy types are consistently repeated, but NPCs have some good range - there’s creativity under the surface, if only in ineffectual ways. It’s fine for comedy to just be funny. Jennifer’s Body and The Seven Year Itch are two of my favourite movies of all time, and in both I overlook glaring flaws because they make me laugh. High on Life does not make me laugh, and more objectively, I’m not sure it ever could.

The blue camoed Gatlian named Kenny shooting green ammo at some alien critters in a forest zone.

I love Rick & Morty, and keep up with each new episode, so I’m part of the target audience. The problem is threefold. First, the silliness of Roiland et al does not translate well to a video game. Long drawn out conversations that might eventually find a gag or two do not work when they force me to put down the controller instead of getting on with the game. Second, over 12 hours or so the jokes become incessant, like the gun repeating reminders about using its special power even when it has no use in the moment, simply because the line is funny. You can turn this down, or even off, but if a positive note on the talking gun game is ‘the guns don’t have to talk!’, you probably have a problem.

Third, and most importantly, High on Life is not on its a-game. I can intellectualise and dissect it all day: the fact is most of the jokes are B-tier at best and would be written out for something better in Rick & Morty. They feel like first drafts. They hit all the conventions of a joke without ever quite being one.

high on life

Everything about High on Life is fine, I suppose, but together they are worse than the sum of their parts. Shooting? Fine. You work up to four runs, the fourth of which you’re unlikely to use in battle, and point and shoot in bland arenas against the same three enemies over and over again. The level variation? Fine. There are cityscapes, jungles, deserts, factories, all the things you’d expect from a video game. All the vague ideas you could write down in an hour then break for an early lunch. The story? Fine. Generic chosen hero, kill these increasingly tough (but not increasingly interesting) bosses at the end of their levels.

Also, the gun is just Morty. If you can’t do enough voices, hire someone else. The gun is just Morty.

High on Life just isn’t very good, and there’s not much more to say. I think a lot of people are taking the route of ‘well, if you love this humour you might enjoy it’, but I already do love this humour and I did not enjoy it. It’s the ghost of video games past, with boring shooting and a bafflingly slim progression loop propped up by bad jokes that feel like some bros on a podcast writing their own Interdimensional Cable skits. It’s free on Game Pass, but your time on this planet is precious. Give this one a miss.

High on Life review card

Score: 2/5. A PC code was provided by the publisher for this review.

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