High on Life (2022 Video Game)
6/10
Not Good or Bad, Just Different
23 December 2022
First off, if you are not a fan of Rick and Morty or Solar Opposites, stay away from this game. The humor is exactly what you'd expect from Roiland.

The premise: I'm sure most of you have looked into this already, but the game is about an Alien race finding Earth and discovering that humans give them an incredible high. You team up with a talking gun named Kenny (voiced by Roiland) to travel to a different planet and explore, fight bosses, find new weapons with different personalities, and visit new places with the help of a washed-up bounty hunter and his gadgets. So let's get into this.

Pros: Humor, Graphics, Dialogue, Exploration, and Boss Sequences.

Roland's humor is littered throughout this game and it never quits. It's very entertaining and scratches just about every humor type there is. The graphics are pretty good given it isn't some triple A title, and I didn't experience *too* many glitches, aside from some dead body shivering and finding some places that I couldn't come back from that forced me to restart checkpoints. The dialogue is entertaining and fruitful, it rewards exploration (although not initially), and the boss fights were fairly well-thought-out and offered some challenge in an otherwise easy game.

Cons: Humor, Longevity, and Mechanics/Button Layout, Music

Yes, the humor is both a pro and a con. I find the humor in this game entertaining up until the moment I don't, and then I can't do it anymore. It's important to note that you can turn off the frequency of dialogue in the settings, but it's crazy that it's even an option. It's as if THEY knew it was too much and just put a filter setting in the game instead of loosening up on all the repetitive word vomit from the get-go. They even have a character in the game whose sole purpose is to annoy you; while I can respect how much they lean into their self-awareness, I would have appreciated more substance to counter the incessant stimulation. I had to take frequent breaks from this game as I usually couldn't play it for more than 45 minutes at a time, not due to the stimulation per se, but predominately due to its glaring contrivance.

It's a shorter game, but I question its ability to maintain relevancy outside the 8 hours you dedicate to it. I would not buy this game for full price personally, but if you find it on Game Pass then there's really no downside to downloading it.

The game mechanics are slow in my opinion, and the button layout is odd. I would find myself rarely using stronger attacks because it didn't feel particularly satisfying or all that necessary. The fighting is fine, but lackluster.. and the music is fun at first but gets old a few hours in. Avid gamers will definitely notice the wonkiness, but a casual gamer would barely notice.

Overall I think people should try it out for themselves, but if you have other games you're dying to play first then I'd leave it on the backburner.
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