Help! I don’t know how the hell to describe this damn shooter without breaking all the rules and regulations from the editorial department!
Shit. Ey. You won’t know it, but there are occasionally certain, um… creative differences between me and the editorial staff when I get overly flowery with my paraphrases and language. Sometimes messes just slip through unnoticed during proofreading, but I’m completely screwed with High on Life.
This game can’t be described accurately or objectively at all without being explicit, so I won’t even try. Nice talking to some of you, then from next week I’ll probably be a dog groomer or something.
So: I tested High on Life. During my 15 hours of play, I exerted all my willpower not to shoot a deliberately annoying alien child in the game. I was then encouraged by his mother to go ahead and do it, and got an achievement for it.
I got a jerry can full of alien sperm from a guy in a trech coat and fine ribs. I let a homeless guy into my house who shit all over the potted plants. A yellow puddle formed in front of the sofa where he was taking up residence, which continued to grow after each completed mission.
I watched three indescribably bad full-length feature films on monitors in the game world. I fixed a toilet for two aliens – one sat on top of the toilet, the other waited downstairs and that’s as far as I want to describe this scenario. Let me put it this way: If you don’t like me and my articles, you will hate High on Life. Otherwise, it might be worth a look.
Fuck yeah!
There’s swearing, there’s body fluids raining, High on Life is one of the crudest games I’ve ever tested. Off the top of my head, the only one that comes to mind is (the uncensored in England) South Park: The Stick of Truth with its Nazi fetuses, which was a touch more violent.
In High on Life, you play an intergalactic bounty hunter who hunts down an alien crime syndicate that abducts humans and uses them as drugs in a wittily told story. You briefly select a face at the start of the game, which has exactly as much effect as it once did in Anthem (exactly zero, you never get to see it again). Speaking in your place is an arsenal of living weapons, all of which are bloodthirsty and comment on each kill with appropriate enthusiasm.
The guns aren’t terribly accurate, the perceived five different enemy types are strunzdoof, and outside of the very good boss fights, the game only offers any form of challenge on the highest of the three difficulty levels.
Knifey the knife goes into ecstasy whenever you eviscerate a boss monster with it. Pistol Kenny shoots semi-automatic green goop, bug-eyed Gus acts as a shotgun, and the extremely foul-mouthed Sweezy is a precision rifle. The guns are all quite nice, but become almost pointless as soon as you unlock Creature.
Creature rapidly gives birth to offspring, which will pounce on your enemies and eat them. Towards the end you get the somewhat damaged Lezduit, who can barely pronounce his own name and toast whole armies of enemies, but takes a good eternity and a half to reload.
Funnier than you think
Although this may sound a bit dull at first, it’s fun because both enemies and weapons comment on everything with totally stupid sayings. Example: “I’m gonna make love to the bounty hunter’s corpse, I don’t care what holes they have!”
However, this also means that you have to understand these sayings in the exclusively English voice output, because on the one hand the gags are often difficult to read in the middle of the fight in the form of German subtitles, but on the other hand they are also completely provisionally translated, as is unfortunately normal for most games today. Expect the usual translation errors and misunderstandings that arise when copywriters don’t know the context. I’ll come back to the gags in a moment.
Despite the comparatively small arsenal of weapons, the fun of the game also comes from the special abilities of your equipment. The knife also serves as a climbing hook, Kenny’s snot opens locked doors and triggers catapults, Gus shoots platforms for climbing and so on. Through such gimmicks and upgrades as boost manoeuvres and a jetpack, you become more and more agile and gain access to more and more hidden goodies in the large, expansive levels.
It’s worth revisiting old areas later in the game to loot treasure chests that were previously unreachable. If you despise backtracking, you can get through the game without re-exploring, but this will also shorten the net playing time to around ten hours and you will miss out on various gags and goodies.
Special Humour
High on Life is highly polarising and has a very specific target audience. The gags are not just deliberately gross and cross boundaries. In the game, Justin Roiland, who voices most of the characters, does exactly what Justin Roiland does: he stutters, repeats himself, burps full out in mid-sentence, drags out awkward, surreal conversations over and over again to the maximum.
Pistol Kenny speaks exactly like Morty, other characters sound like Rick, most are somewhere in between. Sometimes, though, I just want to shoot the shit, please, and I don’t want to do it for fifteen minutes at a time, so I walk away and the NPCs acknowledge it with an “Oh, okay, fuck you then!”, or grumble that I find my time too important for their monologues.
There is a hidden cinema in the game, it runs “Demon Winds” in full feature length with commentary by Red Letter Media. Also “Blood Harvest” with Tiny Tim and “Tammy and the T-Rex” with Denise Richards and Paul Walker are in the game. Yes, I’ve sat in a video game next to aliens on a soaked couch watching some of the worst full length gaming movies of all time!
I enjoyed almost every minute of this game, even though I find it hard to imagine a person who would seriously share that attitude. Technically, the game is okay – the environments are chic and varied, the creatures are wacky, the music is easy on the ears and I didn’t experience any stutters or dropouts, which some users complain about, except for two small script hangs. The latter were quickly fixed by reloading my save game.
High on Life is included in Microsoft’s Game Pass, otherwise it costs 50 Euros
Editor’s verdict
High on Life is one of those games that exist just for my sake. I have no one in my circle of friends who has ever even heard of Red Letter Media or seen any of Joel Haver’s bizarre sketches. Of course, if you don’t know them, you don’t get anything out of their guest appearances. And if you can’t relate to Justin Roiland, you won’t get anything out of this game anyway. If you don’t understand the voice-over, you’ve also lost, because no one wants to read subtitles in a first-person shooter all the time or dialogue that is at best poorly translated over several minutes. It frustrates me immensely how lovelessly translations are handled in most games these days! Okay, Squanch Games is probably not a developer worth millions, but then please don’t charge 50 euros for this game! I think that’s cheeky.
I sincerely hope that High on Life will appeal to a few of you despite its limited target audience, because basically I would like to see more games like this. A single player shooter with an extensive campaign, no lootboxes, overpriced skins or any other DLC nonsense. Add to that a crude sense of humour that has already heated up some over-sensitive minds, wacky characters and designs, great environments and a surprisingly good soundtrack and this mechanically rather mediocre shooter becomes more than the sum of its parts. I’ve always wanted to use that saying, and it fits perfectly here.
