”You ever been to the big city? Because you’re about to, except that it’s a space city! It’s a huge space city and you’re gonna be outta your element! Welcome to f—in’ spaaaace!”~KennySome games are universally loved and adored, with objectively great gameplay and stories that become instant classics. We’ve seen many such games featured in TA Playlist, with glowing reviews in the forums and everyone saying how much they loved this moment or that feature and what a great time they had playing it.This month’s game was decidedly not one of those. In fact, this month’s game probably had the highest percentage of negative comments of any month in TA Playlist history. And yet, it was one of the most popular games on Xbox Game Pass when it launched last December, and it still carries a very strong 4.06 out of 5.00 user rating on TrueAchievements. Online reviews are similarly split, with some declaring it the funniest game of all time and others condemning it as the worst piece of garbage ever produced. Whether you love it or hate it probably comes down to one thing… your sense of humor.The game in question is High On Life, which beat out Hi-Fi RUSH, Pentiment, and Return to Monkey Island for our “Best of Game Pass” July 2023 TA Playlist poll. Developed and published by List of games developed by Squanch Games, High on Life is a first-person shooter with a strong emphasis on the off-the-wall “Rick and Morty”-esque humor that creator Justin Roiland is known for. In fact, except for the lack of the titular characters, High on Life feels like it would be right at home as part of that series. Right from the jump, High on Life starts throwing curveballs at you, with the opening title screen booting to “Buck Thunder II: Xenoslaughter” – a late-90s Doom-style FPS that serves as the opening tutorial for those who don’t know how to jump, shoot, or crouch. Cylon 118 said: I really loved the way this game did its basic movement tutorial in the form of my character playing a video game with Rick yelling at me the entire way got me in the right mood to play more!The game-within-a-game is interrupted by Lizzie, the unnamed protagonist’s sister. Your parents have just left for a week-long trip, and she needs your help to get some “supplies” for a party she’s planning for that night. You don’t get a chance to go on the booze run, though, because as soon as you step outside your house, aliens attack your neighborhood, intending to enslave the human race and smoke them as psychedelic drugs.Lucky for you, you pick up a talking gun named Kenny and start putting your video game skills to good use, blasting all the aliens in your cul-de-sac. With Kenny’s help, you secure some alien tech and warp your entire house to Blim City in search of the legendary bounty hunter Gene Zaroothian, who Kenny hopes will help you fight the alien crime syndicate known as the G3 Cartel.Unfortunately, Gene’s days of bounty hunting are over – he’s lost one eye, two legs, and his home, and you find him sleeping on a bench in Blim City. He does, however, still have a fully functional bounty hunting suit, and he offers it to you on the condition that he gets to move into your house. Lizzie is less than thrilled with your new guest, but Gene is a genuine help, directing you toward your next bounties as you blast your way through the G3 cartel. You’ll have to hunt down six of the G3’s top officers across three distinct worlds (the metropolitan Blim City and its Slums, the jungle world of Zephyr Paradise, and the desert asteroid of Port Terrene) before finally taking on the G3’s leader, Garmantuous, with the fate of humanity in the balance.As you complete your missions, you’ll also pick up other talking weapons to add to your arsenal. Kenny and his companions are Gatlians, an entire race of sentient weapons who were also victims of genocide at the hands of the G3. Each weapon has its own personality and combat abilities, as well as a secondary fire mode (that they shoot from their “Trick Hole”), which are used in both combat and environmental puzzle-solving.Arrogant and condescending Sweezy, for example, is a needler-style rifle that shoots exploding crystals, but she can also shoot a time bubble to slow down enemies and fast-moving environmental objects. Shotgun-like Gus is more laid back and amicable, and while his primary firing mode is only effective at short range, he can also produce a vacuum effect to bring enemies closer, and shoot out a disk that slices through enemies like a sawblade and creates ledges in certain types of walls to allow the player to reach otherwise inaccessible areas. Then there’s Knifey, a bloodthirsty, psychopathic knife that doubles as a grappling hook, and will feature prominently in the upcoming “High on Knife” DLC.Since you play as a silent protagonist, the guns do most of the talking, and this is where the game’s divisiveness starts to show, with the main gun, Kenny, as the prime example. Voiced by Roiland himself, Kenny’s tone and speech patterns are very similar to Morty’s, and the overall tone and style was so similar to an episode of “Rick and Morty” that this was an immediate turn-off to several people who aren’t fans of that show.BigBanjo K said:Tried High on Life when it first released and found everyone annoying. Rick & Morty ain’t for me.mapphew said: I hadn’t done a TA playlist game in a while but figured it would give me the incentive to finish up the completion for it after starting it when it originally came out. After playing through the story, I’m not going to lie; I’m a bit whelmed. The Rick and Morty style of comedy starts to get old after about 2-3 hours in, and once the novelty [wears off], it becomes a very basic FPS with somewhat minimal upgrades to your suit and guns (something I didn’t even realize was in the game until after completing the story).For those unfamiliar with the “Rick and Morty style of humor,” it has a tendency to blend clever and sophisticated concepts with very low-brow poop and fart jokes, along with a lot of fourth-wall-breaking meta humor, all delivered in a sort of ad-libbed stream-of-consciousness style full of “um”s and “uh”s and stuttering. Some people find it extremely funny, while others… not so much. And even among those who are generally okay with it, there were some who felt that the style just didn’t work in this game.HawkeyeBarry20 said:I finished Trover Saves the Universe not too long ago, and the humor in that game got old quick. With all the good things I heard about this game, I thought they ironed some things out and made a real solid game. I’ve only dived it, so my opinion doesn’t mean much, but it looks like the same issue. The constant talking works perfectly in a 20-minute Rick and Morty episode but much longer than that, and it gets old quick. It’s like Squanch Games only has one gag, and they use it constantly.In preparing these articles, I often spend time watching Let’s Plays and game reviews to get a sense of how much the sentiment in the forums matches the critical reception to the game, and this point about the humor working better in a TV episode was also made by Gameranx in their High on Life – Before You Buy video. While the review was very positive overall (the words “surprisingly good” were used several times), Falcon had this to say about the humor:For me, the humor is good but suffers from a key problem. […] In High on Life, Justin Roiland is not required to edit himself. And that results in a situation where I find myself laughing at something like it gets me going, and then it keeps going after I’ve stopped laughing. And there are times that that works and gets me laughing again, and there are times that it doesn’t. If we’re talking about a TV show that is attempting to get quickly through a narrative, the times where that works, the stuff where they go “I can’t not put this in,” that’s what goes into the shows. In this game, it’s just everything – clearly everything went in. And I really want to stress that doesn’t mean the humor is bad; I actually love this style of humor. But it also definitely made me appreciate the process that Justin Roiland clearly has to go through when making an episode of a TV show, making decisions as to what is really the strongest stuff to keep in.”It should probably be noted that Roiland isn’t going through any sort of editing process at the moment, as this review came out before he was forced to resign from Squanch Games, as well as his work on Rick and Morty and Solar Opposites, due to allegations of sexual harassment and domestic abuse. While the court case against him was eventually dropped due to lack of evidence, Roiland has not returned to working on any of these projects as far as we’re aware.jimbobvaquero said:I’m not an R&M fan, and the whole Roiland stink further compels me to leave this one alone.In any case, another issue due to the change in format is that the writers were not bound by trying to maintain a TV-14 rating, so they were free to let the profanity fly. Not a problem for many of our commenters, probably, but at least one person did find that to be a huge negative.FruitofPassion said:I wouldn’t say I enjoy the humor style of this game, but I don’t find it unbearably annoying either, as many likely will due to its difficulty to get accustomed to if it’s not your type. There were still many sections that gave me a real good laugh, though, and I kinda enjoyed the gameplay. The main issue, for me though, was its careless use of foul language. There’s nothing wrong with having it, but when you can’t speak a sentence without dropping 3 F-bombs in it, and that’s how every single character talk. It’s unbearably annoying; it’s weak writing. It really ruined what could have otherwise been a great game for me.It’s fair to say that if you can’t stomach the tone or style of this particular brand of comedy, you’re probably not going to enjoy High on Life. The humor is such a ubiquitous feature of the game that it will inevitably color the rest of your experience… if you’re laughing at the jokes and loving all the little details and easter eggs in the world, you’ll probably have a good time regardless of anything else that happens. On the other hand, if you’re already irritated by the constant chatter, and you’re just getting more annoyed the longer it goes on, that’s going to amplify every other quibble you have with the game, as discussed by two of our regular TA Playlist forum contributors:xuxicroptop said: I can’t stress how much I frigging regret starting this game. The pure anger I have within 20 minutes of this game at the awful enemies and frigging 40-year-old man who never grew up out of high school playground humor is frigging grating on my last nerves[…] I’m 35 minutes in, not even first boss, and I’m already wanting to delete this game and get a MIB memory wipe.TymanTheLong said:You can turn off ambient companion dialog in the Settings, that way you’ll only get actual quest/story comments. The game also has subtitles so you can just read the comments instead of listen, and finally, don’t forget the waypoint system with your D-pad, so you know where to go even if you missed a dialog prompt.But honestly, it wasn’t worth it for me. After the second boss I just uninstalled. The game is annoying AND the shooting is like super low rent Doom. It’s neither smooth nor good and I found the enemies, especially bosses, to be uninteresting and not fun.TymanTheLong has a much more detailed criticism in the spoiler thread, so that’s definitely worth checking out, but they sum it up like this:TymanTheLong said:Again, I really thought I’d enjoy High On Life, but the gameplay is pretty bad, the story is bad, and the humor was slapped into the game without a care as to how the medium of a video game might make it land differently. And by landing differently, I mean the humor isn’t very good. The only conclusion I can come to is that High On Life is a freshman effort that just didn’t work out or it’s a lazy cash in and I don’t know enough about its backstory to tell which, but the game doesn’t really inspire me to even care enough to find out.I’ll be honest, this has been a tough article for me to write because, personally, I really enjoyed this game, and I found myself disagreeing with the forum posts more than usual. Having completed the game back in January, I posted this in the Spoiler-Free forum for my participation for the month:BetaSigX20 said:Overall, I had a great time with this game. I thought the humor was clever in all the right spots, with a good amount of stupid mixed in (but not enough to ruin it). Obviously, that’s a matter of taste and tolerance, so your mileage may vary.As far as the mechanics of the game go, I had no complaints. The arsenal gave a good mix of combat options, and I like all the different traversal options for the platforming and exploration. I didn’t go into this one with a lot of expectation (I played it about a month after release, and had heard mostly only the criticisms about the collectibles), but I was really pleasantly surprised. As this is meant to be a wrap-up of the community vibe on the game, rather than my own personal review, I try not to inject my own opinions too much, but hopefully, no one minds me offering up a dissenting opinion. We did have plenty of other positive comments in the forums, but most were pretty general in nature, like these:Not Jonni said:This was great!Sapicubo said:Funny game.mo0ohammed19988 said:I had a lot of fun playing it. Recommend it to everyoneAs for why opinions vary so wildly for this game, I put it down mostly to a matter of taste. It’s okay if we all don’t like the same things, and while I have a hard time agreeing with some of the harsher criticisms of the game — I can’t understand calling High on Life’s boss battles “boring” or “generic” in relation to a lot of other FPS games I’ve played, for example — I think it’s fine to say that this sort of game just isn’t meant for everyone, and if you’re not enjoying it in the first couple of hours, it’s probably best to just move on (something that was a lot harder to do before Game Pass was a thing).J2B9 said:It’s all subjective, so yeah, you can look to see how it might be for you. In general, it has good ratings, and even here on TA, it’s 4.0+ stars, and that factors in the people here who rate things just based on achievements (and with this game launching with broken achievements, it definitely wouldn’t have a boost from that).The people who didn’t like it are probably just more inclined to say so based on it really being annoying to them compared to those who enjoyed it and probably didn’t have much else to say.xuxicroptop said:Kind of wish Recap did a count of how high/low a rating changes for a game over the course of its TA Playlist month, I would be very interested to see how the rating changed over the course of the month for this one.The answer is not much. Back when we announced the voting for July 2023, High on Life had a TA user rating of 4.07, and while we didn’t track it to see if there were any fluctuations over the month, here in August 2023, it is sitting at 4.06 out of 5.00, just a 0.01-star drop after the Playlist month. The rating is based on over 2,600 votes, so even if some of our Playlist participants hated the experience, it wasn’t enough to move that needle very much.As J2B9 pointed out, there were some glitched/broken achievement issues at launch, which forced some people into a second playthrough after those issues were patched. Among people who criticized the game for something other than being generally annoyed by the humor, this was by far the biggest complaint.Ultima22 said:I was happy but a bit anxious seeing this pop up as the playlist game, as I had abandoned a run through closely following the release when the glitchy achievement implementation started to become more prevalent.Overall though, I don’t mind the humor, so I started my new playthrough and finished it in about 3ish days? Music/gunplay is kinda weak but the writing and story are worth sitting through. Achievement mop-up was a slog, with the lack of maps/warp systems making it go a lot longer than it should’ve.SparrowSP said:If it weren’t for the Highly missable Globbo cheevo bug, that made play an additional 3hrs of the game, I’d give it a 4-star rating. The HUD could be more intuitive, and they could have made a world map to locate the boxes faster and more accurately.I had fun tho.o Heres Jonny o said: I really enjoyed this, however played it on release as I couldn’t wait, and some of the achievements didn’t work at that point which was a shame. I may play it again at some point, though. Humor was right up my street.Even with all the achievements working correctly, finding all the Lugloxes (sort of living loot chests) and grinding out kills of different enemy types to unlock all the forum posts were frustrating tasks for some gamers.Ayzic said:I’ve already completed this one, so I won’t be playing it this month. I thought the experience was okay overall, but it did start to overstay its welcome a bit near the end of the completion grind. If a 100% completion isn’t the goal, I think most players will have a more positive perspective than those like me who spent a few too many hours grinding out the forum challenges.All told, we had 4,902 tracked gamers playing along with High on Life during July, with 2,441 starting it for the first time and 277 getting the final achievement for completion. For most people, that was the 6.80-ratio Mods Please Ban Achievement, which was unlocked just 278 times during the month. The most common achievement was Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight, which is unmissable and story-related, though not the first achievement available in the game.The TA Community unlocked a total of 38,713 High on Life achievements in July, worth 1,048,790 Gamerscore and 1,865,186 TrueAchievement Score. Given the mostly negative reactions in the comments, we weren’t expecting many people to play the entire game during the month, but a surprising 90 people earned a Shout-Out by unlocking all 32 of the game’s achievements in July. HappyTheDevil had the fastest completion, with just 46 hours and 41 minutes between the first unlock on July 3 and the final achievement on July 5. Great work to all of you!August is almost over (I’ll try to get these articles out faster in the future, I swear!), but there may still be time for you to earn a badge for the August Playlist game, Planet of Lana, either by earning an achievement or by posting in the Spoiler-Free and Spoiler Discussion Threads to give us your thoughts. And don’t forget to join us when the new month starts for the September TA Playlist game, Borderlands. See you next month!
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