We were unable to communicate with the creatures, as memorably mourned by Edge Magazine. I guess a King Kong-sized monkey must have curled a finger someplace because High on Life had me pleading with the creatures to stop flapping their mouths. Generally speaking, 2022 has been a year where video games talked too much, whether it was the arduous cutscenes in Dying Light 2 or Atreus' unpleasant hints in the PS5-exclusive God of War: Ragnarok. With linguistic diarrhea so severe it might prolapse its face, High on Life pushes this tendency to its aggravating limit.
If you're contemplating anything, "Of course. There is a lot of chatting in this game because it was made by the studio that Rick and Morty's creator also co-founded "I'll cut you off there. In the 20-minute animated series Rick and Morty, Justin Roiland's quick-stammering delivery is (typically) channeled via writing that is as incisive as the pickled scientist's caustic tongue. Interdimensional Cable, a 15-hour marathon of meandering word salad that is continuously looking for the humor but only infrequently delivers it, generally wrapped in something sticky, is high on Life. The choice is between getting your head pushed into a vat of white vinegar or getting an injection of pricey balsamic.
Not that High on Life is never humorous, though. It is at times. Yet the main issue with High on Life is that anything happens only sometimes. It's a bad first draught of a comedy script with a few funny gags, a generic sci-fi setting with a few nice levels, and an utterly forgettable shooter with a small number of fascinating ideas that are overused.
Before I begin dismembering the corpse, let's inspect it. You play a generic adolescent in High on Life who is at home alone with their younger sister when, oh dear, aliens attack. Nevertheless, using one of the invader's weapons—a gallian, a sentient weapon, it turns out—you manage to flee to Blim City, an alien city. When you discover that humans have become the interplanetary underworld's most popular new drug, you decide to kill the leaders of the G3 Cartel, the organization that invaded Earth, with the help of a down-on-his-luck bounty hunter.
All things considered, it's a solid start. High on Life offers some spectacular places, especially when you leave your boxy suburb for the busy and vibrant alien city of Blim City, while not having the sleek decent aesthetics of, for example, Modern Warfare 2. Picking up a gun and hearing Not-Morty start babbling out of it is enjoyable. The Hookshot concept of having weapons that are also characters is intriguing.
