High On Life

I went into High On Life expecting a thin comedy sketch dressed up as a shooter. What I got was a bounty-hunting FPS with genuine Metroidvania bones, a genuinely strange alien world, and five talking guns that have more personality than the cast of most triple-A action games. The core hook is simple: you are a slacker whose house gets warped into space after an alien cartel invades Earth, and your weapons, a race called Gatlians, are living creatures who banter with you constantly. Kenny the pistol, Gus the suction shotgun, Sweezy the time-bubble SMG, Creature with his mind-controlling child-bullets, and the unhinged knife Knifey each have primary fire, alternate fire, and a "trick hole" special that doubles as a puzzle-solving tool. Switching between them to hear their reactions to enemies, environments, and each other is genuinely amusing, and the combat loop of wall-running, grapple-point traversal, and armor-scavenging from downed enemies has a kinetic, Doom-adjacent rhythm that surprised me. Where the game earns its 89% on Steam is in how confidently it commits to its own absurdity. The writing goes for a joke every few seconds, firing humor like a shotgun blast and hoping enough pellets connect. Some will. The referential meta-humor, your guns name-dropping indie games, a full in-game screening of licensed B-movies, a running gag involving an organization called Mothers Against Violence, lands better than the gross-out toilet material that fills the gaps. The world itself is more detailed than it looks: alien cities have their own subcultures, throwaway NPCs offer side quests and zingers, and the biomes you fight through are varied enough to stay visually interesting across the campaign. The art direction, that particular clash of grounded suburban realism dropped into a Play-Doh alien cosmos, is one of the better visual concepts in recent action games. The honest criticism is real, though. The shooting itself is competent but not sharp. Enemies react to damage in a fairly scripted, arena-pop cadence, and the gunplay lacks the precision feedback of the games it borrows from, the glory-kill health recovery from Doom, the boost-slide from Vanquish, the grapple hook feel of Far Cry are all approximated but none are quite matched. The campaign wraps in roughly 8-10 hours, and the ending has a habit of arriving without fanfare and leaving players uncertain it is actually over. Load times on PC at launch were long enough to kill pacing during exploration, and some players reported jank and the occasional crash. Squanch Games patched actively in the weeks after release, and most of the roughest edges have been smoothed, but "rough around the edges" never fully stopped being accurate. Who should buy this: if you ever enjoyed Rick and Morty, Adult Swim absurdism, or the chaotic comedy of Borderlands without loving its looter systems, High On Life is a tighter and stranger proposition than its marketing suggests. If the idea of a talking shotgun named Gus pulling enemies toward you with a vacuum-suction ADS mechanic while cracking wise sounds tedious rather than fun, nothing here will convert you, and that's fine. The humor is the whole product. The game even lets you dial back how much the guns talk in the audio settings, which is a self-aware admission that the volume can get overwhelming. Take it slow, talk to the NPCs, watch the in-game TV, and treat it like a comedy special with solid enough combat to stay interesting between the punchlines.

Alex · Scout Team

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