High on Life did exactly what we expected. It was a video game littered with Rick & Morty-esque jokes with some combat to tie it together. It had its moments, but you’d be forgiven for tapping out after the first two dozen quips.
Thankfully, High on Life 2 remembers that it is first and foremost a video game. This isn’t a slideshow of jokes, but rather, a promising shooter full of gags that could only work in a game. Better yet, the gunplay has been expanded upon and improved, letting us embark on a silky smooth murder spree – this time on a skateboard, but I’ll get to that in a bit.
During my Gamescom 2025 preview, I had a little under an hour to make my way through one of the levels. Here, we were spat out at “ConCon”; a convention of conventions. The first task? Finding somewhere to park at Parking Con. That is where the magic began.
Parking Con is a bloodbath. Finding a parking space means getting out of the car and slaughtering anyone who dares to try to take an empty spot. At some point, someone with the same idea called dibs on a spot. I shot him without being prompted to, and lo and behold, his dibs were gone. Instantly, there was a smile on my face.
Later on, you have to get through Murder Con. This involves entering a tournament, trapped until you take down enough of your opponents in the arena. This lets High on Life 2 put its best foot forward, showing off the new and returning weapons, and how much faster the traversal is this time around.
Throughout it all, the stage’s boss (a senator who wants to legalize experimentation on humans) pops his head in to taunt you. You can try to shoot him before the boss battle, but he’ll just chuck a security guard at you to take the hit for him. Yep, every single time.
Comedy that serves a purpose
Now, everything I just explained is standard shooter fare: clearing an objective in Parking Con, getting stuck in a colosseum match at Murder Con, and putting up with an essential character having an invisible shield until you’re allowed to fight them. But it’s all so interwoven with the comedy that you hardly notice. Simply put, High on Life 2 just makes running around and killing things so much fun.
Naturally, this is due in no small part to its script, with each weapon chiming in with its own gags as we’d expect, but it is also thanks to the biggest upgrade from the original: the gameplay.
This time around, we can race around on a skateboard, getting us around faster. It even doubles up as a weapon, letting you kick the skateboard into an enemy while you’re zipping around the map. When you’re fighting your way through Parking Con, there is nothing more satisfying than lobbing it into someone’s face because they stole your spot. And when you’re actually on the board, the controls are sleek, making it so much more enjoyable to weave between bullets. ConCon was our playground, our skatepark, and our bloodbath.
On top of that, it was a surprise to see just how reactive High on Life 2 was in this demo. The Squanch Games devs watching over my shoulder were incredibly pleased to see me stop in every nook and cranny, appreciating all the gags that you can otherwise skip past. I think they may have even forgiven me for my rubbish gameplay because of that.
They did surgery on a gun
I digress, so let me pick an example. I got to perform surgery on Ralph Ineson. He plays an alien hitman, and after taking him down, you can recruit him as a gun. Yeah, just go with it. To turn him into a gun, you need to complete a set of tasks that take him about two real-world minutes to explain. Or, you can press a button to get on with it, and he’s blown away by your ability to perform such an intricate surgery before he could finish walking you through it. I, on the other hand, put the controller down and listened to every word he had to say, grinning like an idiot the whole time.
This wasn’t an isolated case. Earlier on, you needed to take an elevator. It’s out of order, as some poor mechanic left to guard it will tell you. If you want, you can just push past him and try it anyway. Yeah, it’s broken, and you just broke it even more. He’ll walk you through some repairs, but you can botch them too, and then be made to count to 20 before pushing a button to reset the thing, while someone keeps interrupting you. Beautiful stuff, and on my part, absolutely deserved.
This is a great way to tackle High on Life 2’s greatest hurdle: how comedy is incredibly subjective. That, and the fact that a video game is a whole lot longer than a TV show, and will be played in ways you can’t predict. Rather than resign itself to that fate, High on Life 2 appears to be turning those confines into an opportunity. Players will walk into set pieces and gags, or they will not, and make the most of it when they do stumble into something.
So far, the best thing High on Life 2 has going for it is how it marries its two biggest selling points together, having the comedy and action work in tandem. Now, we just have to wait and see what it does with them for the full release. The foundations are here, and it’s enough for Squanch Games to build something that is so much more than what came before it.
