High On Life 2

My first hour with High On Life 2 told me everything about who this game is for: I kickflipped off an alien bureaucrat, ground a rail while a sentient submachine gun narrated my acrobatics, and then fought a boss whose entire arena was a UI menu that I had to navigate to deal damage. That is either your idea of a great Thursday night or absolute torture, and the game has zero interest in convincing fence-sitters. Squanch Games built the sequel around one central idea that started as a throwaway pitch: replace the sprint button with a skateboard. The result is the best thing in the game. Pressing sprint drops your character onto the board, letting you grind rails, chain jumps, wall-ride surfaces, and kickflip directly into enemies to maintain momentum during fights. The whole level structure was then designed around that conceit, which means open corridors double as skate lines and combat arenas reward aggression over cover. The movement feels genuinely faster and more fluid than the original, and the skateboard doubles as a panic escape during the game's more chaotic firefights. It is not Tony Hawk, the physics are looser and occasionally overwhelming, but it adds real kinetic energy that the first game badly needed. The Gatlians, the arsenal of talking alien weapons, return as both guns and co-stars. New additions Travis (voiced with relentless absurdist charm by Ken Marino) and Sheath slot in alongside returning favorites, and each one carries distinct abilities beyond their primary fire. A submachine gun-style Gatlian offers a charged precision shot; a shotgun-spread weapon handles crowd clearing; boss encounters are structured around which abilities each specific gun unlocks, echoing the way Zelda dungeons teach mechanics through their final rooms. That design works well in the first half of the campaign. Where it gets shaky is in the back half, where encounter patterns start repeating and the novelty of the mechanics fades enough that the thinness of the underlying combat loop becomes visible. Reviewers across the board flagged the shooting itself as the weakest link: responsive enough, improved from the original, but still lacking the punch you'd expect from an action game asking you to spend 10-17 hours with it. The structural upgrade worth noting is the move to three separate hub zones instead of one, each gated behind abilities you unlock during the campaign in a loose Metroidvania style. Missions stay varied across that runtime, a detective sequence on a cruise liner, a bloodsport arena, a visit to a zoo where the exhibits are humans, and side content like Luglox container hunts, NPC conversations, and cosmetic upgrades for your board (grip tapes, wheels, shoes) fill out the spaces in between. The dialogue choice system marketed as a new feature turns out to be surface-level, with selections having little impact on story direction. PC performance at launch was genuinely rough, with frame drops on high-end rigs and bugs that blocked progress, though Squanch has been actively patching. The community largely attributes early negative user scores to that launch state rather than the game itself, and the situation has improved since February. Justin Roiland is not involved; Kenny has been written out entirely. The humor retains the crude, fourth-wall-breaking Adult Swim register of the original without him. If you bounced hard off the first game's comedy or found its gunplay unsatisfying, nothing here will convert you. If you liked the original's personality and wished the movement had more life, the sequel delivers exactly that upgrade.

Alex · Scout Team

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