High On Life 2 | Review

High On Life 2 is a sleeker, stronger, bigger, yet smaller, sequel that takes all the positives from the first game and cuts out all the excess. Your intergalactic bounty hunter is a huge celebrity, with fame, fortune, and a superpowered suit.

That would make for a boring video game, so expect to lose it all and go on the run as the most wanted outlaw in the galaxy. Big Pharma is crushing humans into pill form. You, your friendly sentient guns, and the rest of your ragtag group will have to fight to once again save humanity.

It’s one hell of a 10 to 15-hour adventure, with excellent gameplay, graphics, pacing, Day One Game Pass inclusion, and the best humor in any game I have played. Who knew that getting rid of Justin Roiland would lead to something so much funnier this time around?

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The setup for High On Life 2 is a simple one. After a freaking hilarious opening, that we’ve been asked not to spoil, your Bounty Hunter from the first game is on the other side of the law. Your sister Lizzy is leading a human rights terrorist group, and you’re the newest member.

Humor from comedians and writers who know and love video game tropes is, once again, the heart of the game. The majority of High On Life 2 takes place on a Halo ring world in the city of Circuit Arcadia. They literally call it that once you see it for the first time. It is a massive area, with less focus on Metroidvania upgrades this time around.

They’re still there for getting to certain areas. You’ll need specific upgrades or weaponry to access them, for both main and optional content. A big change is just how obfuscated that optional content is. In between each main mission, you can go and explore any previous location at your leisure. Bumping around is how you find side content in the form of a handful of activities and a lot of puzzles centered around earning pesos and upgrades.

HOL2 is a far more focused title, if you want it to be. The main quests will see you become strong enough to rarely die during combat if you’re any good. The side content instead focuses on customizing your character’s look and skateboard. Early on, you’ll steal a boss’s deck, in one of the funnier encounters of any game. From that point on, you can go to a skate shop to buy custom decks and colors for the various parts of the board.

A bit later, an alien that looks like and I’m pretty sure is voiced by Jon Watters, will sell you costumes at a Spirit Halloween store. I ended up going with the flowing red cape Dracula look. There is so much absurdist, clever humor that my wife commented how I had been laughing out loud enough that she knew I was loving the title. That extends to the gameplay as well.

Skitchin & B! tchin

The new skateboard mechanic is essentially the world’s coolest sprint. At any point, you can quickly hop onto your deck and even use it as a weapon. Jumping off of enemies, slamming into them, or holding melee to send your board flying is immensely satisfying.

The board has its own wall-ride mechanic tied to a ‘grip’ meter. As you get further into the game, this shows up more in some insane platforming sections. The toughest of which are generally tied to optional content.

The shooting feels perfect on PC and good on controller. There’s just a bit too much deadzone by default for me on console. There is no option in the menus to lower it, so there is just the slightest bit of push needed before your aiming reticle begins to move.

I understand why it would be the default, with stick drift a major issue on all three console-based controllers. As someone with a Hall-effect joystick controller, I hope that in the future they give us the option to lower the internal deadzone to 0.

Knife to Meet You

To begin the game, you’ll have Knifey, Weezy, and Gus back from the first game as your weaponry. Ralph Ineson’s Sheath was shown off in previews, and you end up with six weapons in total. It doesn’t sound like much, but they all play great and have individual voicelines for nearly every encounter.

I’m not kidding, depending on which gun you’re using, they will comment in ways tied to your current gameplay or dialogue being spoken to you. Having six weapons have lines for 98% of the game’s interactions is an insane, amazing thing.

Occasionally, you’ll have to make choices that are assigned to specific guns. Outside of those, it really is a free-for-all on whoever you want to have out being the one to respond. That type of crazy dedication permeates throughout the game.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of comedy bits you can find while walking around Circuit Arcadia and throughout each mission. I found the game far funnier despite, or maybe because of, the lack of Kenny and any characters voiced by Justin Roiland.

High On Life 2 feels like a game made by a team that wanted to prove that the biggest name at the studio wasn’t the reason for their success. In just over 3 years, they’ve made a dense sequel, full of writing and performances better than the first game.

Oh Gessie

Classic time wasters are back. From watching movies on the couch with Gene, or dozens of old toy and video game commercials up on your bed, to playing the (Niles) Crane game, and old video games, you can waste dozens of hours goofing off like in the first tile.

While the game never goes full-on emotional gut-punch-y, it does get ‘adult’ a few times, before steering these situations back to the ludicrous in unexpected ways. The familial drama is some of my favorite, which again is hard to talk about without spoilers. Let’s just say Lezduit is a key figure, despite never being back in your arsenal of weaponry.

The game is still a first-person-comedy-shooter at its core. That gameplay, while a little stiff on console, shines in the platforming. It is helped along by a freaking gorgeous look on consoles and PC.

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Using Unreal Engine to great effect, High On Life 2’s graphics stand up to most games, outside of the human models. I think it’s a stylistic choice, but they look like clay-faced and far worse than most of the alien models.

The guns themselves are flipping perfect, matching what we saw in the reveal trailer. Obviously, the camera movement is nowhere near that smooth. It would be miserable to play if it were. The game is happy to be as herky jerky as your mouse/controller to keep the gameplay feeling tight.

Circuit Arcadia is massive, teeming with things to do and characters to interact with. It was difficult to know my way around at first, with a tour guide map that gives you a rough idea of where, instead of explicit instructions.

The game has a mostly functional ping system that gives you a line to follow to your current objective. It does get hung up in the environment at times. Your character is nimble enough to climb around most obstructions, though, so it worked well enough.

Your floating home base of an old arcade in space is a great mix of sites, sounds, and activities. Every space feels more focused in this game compared to the first. I was worried about the lack of locations early on, only to realize just how unexpectedly large and dense they turned out to be.

I mostly played on my Xbox Series X and desktop PC. The game looks and runs fantastically on Xbox’s flagship device, though the image is softer than on my powerful PC rig. Performance on the Xbox Ally X was good at medium to low settings and 1080p. I ended up lowering that to 900p for a closer to locked 60fps experience.

Improv

Every single character in this game seems to do improv at some point, and it’s always funny if not hilarious. Suit-O is back, as your constant companion, helping tutorialized everything. Everyone loves to break the fourth wall, and the scenes you can tell are scripted are as funny as anything.

Between the writing and the voice acting, I have zero complaints. Unlike the first game, which seemed to revel in the ‘going on for too long’ bits, there is a far better mix of that and quick-hitting jokes.

Go in as blind as you can, knowing as little about the story as possible, and you will be rewarded. The twists are both clever and dumb as all hell, in the best ways possible.

The only issues I had were a few times where quests seemed to break. One time, a checkpoint reload fixed it; the other time, it was just me being an idiot and not realizing what I had to do. Performance and optimization were solid outside of that.

Wrapping Things Up

High On Life 2 is bigger yet smaller. It’s both bold and more reserved in how it dishes out gameplay mechanics and story beats. I loved my 15 hours with it, and plan on spending far more digging through every nook and cranny of this ridiculous, fantastic world that Squanch Games has created.

Review code provided by the publisher, Nintendo Switch 2 version available in April 2026