Gaming: Breaking High On Life 2 Review
Squanch's FPS sequel has more creativity in its left shoe than most entire games, but High on Life 2 falls short of excellence.
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What is it A singleplayer FPS with jokes on jokes on jokes.Release date February 13, 2026Expect to pay $60Publisher Squanch GamesDeveloper Squanch GamesReviewed on RTX 5090, Ryzen 7 9800X3D 4.7 GHz, 64GB RAMMultiplayer NoneSteam Deck UntestedLink Official site
I'm sorry Squanch, I wasn't familiar with your game.
No, literally: Despite first-person shooters filling my lungs with oxygen on a daily basis, I gave up on High on Life in 2022 because I burnt out on the Justin Roiland schtick. Rick and Morty was the perfectly messy nihilistic comedy for 18-year-old me, but daily life is drenched in enough ego madness these days that I no longer see the fun in observing something true and then beating it to death with a sledgehammer. High on Life was never so unrelenting in its cynicism, but it was grafting Roiland's voice to my hip in the form of a pistol that got us off on the wrong foot. It's a relationship I never bothered to mend after the disgraced Squanch co-founder resigned in 2023.
High on Life 2 instantly feels different without him. It's nicer, calmer—still very much violent and referential and fourth-wall demolitionist in its humor, but not entertained by cruelty or allergic to being genuine.
An early moment in the first game, wherein a child blocks your path and the joke is that you can kill a kid and isn't that messed up, would feel out of place in High on Life 2.
It's a game that's unabashedly a fan of gross stuff—of squishy bits and "trick holes," of body horror and buckets of blood, and of the occasional fart joke—but doesn't believe that's a pretense to be insufferable. It leaves behind an apparent embarrassment of being commercial art that permeated Roiland's past works and is largely comfortable being a fun shooter and serviceable send up of big pharma.
You play as the Outlaw, the bounty hunter from the first game who spun their killing of a notorious galactic cartel into B-list celebrity status. You're soon catapulted into another hunt that's far more appropriate for the world we live in: assassinating the higher-ups of a major pharmaceutical company leading the charge to legalize human drug production—that is, the
Source: PC Gamer
