High On Life Analysis

Justin Roiland and his team triumph with an ideal shooter for Rick & Morty fans.

Announced last E3 2022, High On Life quickly won the hearts of fans of the darkest and most absurd humor for coming from Squanch Games, a studio founded by Justin Roiland, creator of Rick and Morty. In addition, Roiland himself voices one of the main characters in the game, Kenny, the protagonist’s gun. Yes, the weapons in this game are actually alienYeah, and they won’t stop talking.

High On Life is one of those projects that was being developed exclusively for Stadia, but after the debacle of the Google platform, it was Microsoft who signed Roiland and company so that their first project would reach Xbox Game Pass exclusively for PC and Xbox consoles. Things seem to have gone well, the game is already in the Top 3 most popular games of the moment on Xbox.

High On Life: all the information

Experience with High On Life

Is about a traditional shooter in the first person in every sense of the word. Squanch Games has not thrown the blanket over its head with a project that was great for them, this being their first video game, they have focused on making it fun and making you have a few laughs when you play. They have hit the nail on the head there, at least for the first half of the game.

breaking bad in space

As I said, High On Life is a traditional game for one player, which means that it is a narrative game with a story that acts as a plot link between its various silly bosses in Rick & Morty, and the truth is that the script is quite good . Is quite funny and originaland meets the main premise of entertaining.

Basically, it deals with an alien invasion of Earth by a drug cartel called G3, who are dedicated to “harvesting” life forms from the galaxy to create drugs, and humans are their next target. Going by clichés, the protagonist is the typical adolescent “geek” of video games who is forced to become a bounty hunter to take down the cartel, by being transported with his ditzy blonde sister to an alien city by an alien weapon that swears a lot.

Not bad synopsis, huh? It seems taken directly from one of the chapters of rick & morty interdimensional cable tv. If you like the Adult Swim series, you will undoubtedly enjoy High On Life’s narrative proposal. Literally in the first hour of play you are offered cocaine, you can stab a legless alien or shoot a child for being too heavy. The latter, already seen in a trailer, grants a very funny Achievement that says something like “Fallout didn’t let you do this.”

This premise serves as an excuse for the rest of the development of the game, which consists of take down the kingpins of the cartel going from here to there through spaceupgrade the spacesuit, shoot and stab people. The first half of the game It feels super fresh and funny and witty if you’re into this kind of humor, but the experience tends to deflate past the middle part. Although this is better explained from the playable section.

The ABC’s of shooting games, but with style

High On Life is a shooter without too many pretensions in playable matter, it takes a simple control scheme, without being the best gunplay in the world, and it adds weapons and mechanics as the plot progresses. The jack, knight and king of action games: hook, jet pack, glide, gravity boots, etc.

In other words, it does not invent the wheel, but it does turn out to be fresh and fun thanks, for example, to the different shooting modes of weapons. Weapons that are a character unto themselves and have their own personality. Knifey, the knife, as is logical, he dies to dismember people. Gus, the shotgun, is a bread boy who always seems to be a little stoned. Anyway, each of the weapons has a unique ability and a secondary fire. While Kenny’s ability is to spit out green slime that blows enemies into the air, Gus throws blades that bounce off the stage and enemies.

In my opinion, combat feels a bit halo, in the sense that, apart from tracing almost 1:1 the Needler, it is almost always fired from the hip, the enemies are concentrated in “bases” and are hierarchical. There are some short enemies that don’t stop hanging around and it’s hard not to compare them to the Grunts from Halo.

Still, the combat is one of the reasons why the game starts to get “old” too soon. The variety of enemies is quite limited and the scene design, although not bad, starts to lose its freshness when you return to places already visited. Play the card of incorporating some metroidvania design to reach new chests that were previously inaccessible, but they are still rather simple scenarios and lose that curiosity of the first hours to see what will be the next world to visit. Even so, it is not that they are going to make you long in the 8 hours on average it takes to pass the game.

son of rick and morty

To be the first Squanch Games game, the truth is that you have to take off your hat in terms of the finish and performance of High On Life, since, despite a launch with some errors, the game was quickly patched and looks and works fine on all platforms. Graphically, it stands out a lot due to the finish and its designs, it cannot be denied that it has been from the minds of the creators of Rick & Morty.

In terms of sound, the main attraction of the game is listening dubbing Justin Roiland like Kenny laughing at everything and everyone, toying with breaking the fourth wall, making jokes in bad taste or making fun of the very bases of video games, but unfortunately that comes with the “but” that it is a game that it is not dubbed into our language. This wouldn’t be a problem in most games, but guns don’t literally go silent, and the subtitles are crowded one on top of the other making it difficult to read. Consequently, missing the joke on duty.

Conclusions and note from High On Life

Without a doubt, High On Life has been one of the big surprises of this final stretch of the year and marks a great start for Justin Roiland and the Squanch Games team in the video game industry. It’s far from a perfect game, but its simplicity and humor have managed to win over audiences, being the perfect example of “Xbox Game Pass game” that doesn’t ask too much of the player and ends up being a lot of fun.

I would love to see what Justin Roiland and the team at Squanch Games can do after the success of High On Life, the playable base is good and the universe really attractive. Without a doubt, Xbox Game Pass had a good eye when signing one of the most fun games of the year.