High on Life
(
2022
)
Perhaps I was too hard on Borderlands 3 [2019]. Sure the game is tediously unfunny, indeed it's so appallingly unfunny that it spoils otherwise enjoyable gameplay, but as I surveyed the landscape of “comedy” games I realized how desperately few of them were actually amusing. Occasionally there is a Lisa: The Painful [2014] that manages to be both heart-wrenching and hilarious at the same time but for the most part, you're going to be dealing with a whole lot of garbage that gives the impression of comedy with none of the substance (IE laughter). Part of this is no doubt taste. Surely some troglodytes will find the writing in Forspoken [2023] or Immortals of Aveum [2023] funny, after all each new Marvel movie can somehow be counted on to make back its budget a few times over. However, I fear that there might be something innate to the medium of video games itself that impedes comedy, as even when you have a writer who is normally quite funny, they tend to become absolutely intolerable as soon as they start working on a game.
Case in point with today's game, made by Justin Roiland who has actually written a couple of amusing things in between his busy schedule of alleged sex crimes. Sure, Rick and Morty is the definition of overrated and its fans are concentrated cringe (insert copy-pasta about needing a very high IQ to understand the jokes) but it does actually manage to be pretty damn funny with some consistency. No faint praise from me, a guy who sits through most modern comedies in stone-faced silence, occasionally broken by the interjection “Was that supposed to be funny?” However, his game, High on Life, manages to be about as rollicking a good time as an afternoon visiting your grandma in hospice.
The comedy of the game is exhausted after an admittedly amusing premise: What if alien invaders came to earth not in search of food, resources, or even breeding partners (Mars Needs Women (1968), Inseminoid (1981), or Breeders (1986) in ascending order of sleaze) but instead they are looking for drugs. As it turns out, human beings can give certain alien species the most amazing high in the universe, and the G3 Cartel wants to take over Earth so they can start selling humans to galactic burn-outs and space junkies. Hence the title, as the aliens are literally getting High on Life. This is admittedly a unique and funny idea, unfortunately, this premise will represent the game's high water mark in terms of both originality and humor.
You play as an unnamed teenager with no defining characteristics other than the fact that they are drifting aimlessly through life. As is common for a modern first-person game you get the option to choose your gender from a selector at the beginning. This will not impact how any characters address you, how you yourself sound, or anything in the game's plot. I really struggle to understand the purpose of this selector. This is a first-person game, with an unseen mute protagonist who is just the player's view-port into the world. Do video game companies get a tax break if they add in a gender selector for their player character? As otherwise I see no reason why any developer would think this was a necessary enhancement.
In the opening sequence of the game Earth is invaded by alien drug dealers and the player character and their sister escape with the aid of a sentient gun called Kenny. Kenny is one of the last survivors of a race of sentient alien guns called the Gatlians, and he wants revenge after his home world of Gatlas was destroyed by the G3. He takes you to an alien city where you try to recruit the legendary bounty hunter Gene Zaroothian, who you discover is now a legless vagrant. Rather than getting a bounty hunter who still has all their limbs (or at least a permanent residence), you opt to team up with Gene and start hunting down the members of the G3 Cartel.
The game's jokes come in three flavors, lazy jokes about video game tropes, nonsequiturs with no bearing on the events of the game, and mistaking being annoying for being funny. The third is by far the most common. Get ready for NPCs that stand in your way and block your path for no reason, enemies that don't do any damage but buzz around you constantly talking in a high-pitched voice, and guns that will constantly sprout out lame wisecracks every time you do anything like this is Gex: Enter the Gecko [1998]. Does anyone really find this funny? Because to me it was just obnoxious.
That said, there are a few occasions where the game is genuinely funny. The most memorable instance is when Kenny takes the player character to Space Applebees to tell you about his tragic backstory only to be constantly interrupted by the waiter. The reason why this scene works is because it allows the player to finally be the obnoxious one, instead of having to deal with the nonsensical bullshit of the game we're finally the one dishing it out as we order course after course while Kenny desperately tries to relay his tragic backstory. This ability to reverse the game's usual pattern of NPCs annoying you, and instead dishing out some of the irritation is a refreshing change of pace. Sadly, it is not to last and you will be back to suffering through the game's jokes before long.
Most of the jokes that poke fun at the tropes of video games are just the game embracing that trope and then pointing out how stupid that is. I can't understate how much I hate this approach to humor. Embracing a lazy trope and then commenting that the trope is lazy and stupid does not make you funny. The worst instance of this has to be the whole detective mode sequence which is just a long, tedious detective mode sequence straight from a shitty Batman: Arkham Asylum [2009] knock-off only with the characters constantly complaining about how stupid and annoying this is.
Leaving the tedious story and annoying jokes behind for a moment, High on Life also struggles with the basic aspects of being a shooter. There are way too few guns in this game (being limited to just 4 with an additional cool-down super-weapon you only get for the last mission). The reason for this is obvious: Every gun will be constantly bombarding you with lame jokes and obnoxious comments, so adding a new weapon to your arsenal also means a massive investment in terms of writing and voice acting. It's a problem that could be easily solved if the weapons in the game were not all annoying chatterboxes, but High on Life is far too committed to this bad idea to abandon it even when it starts negatively affecting the gameplay.
The firearm issue is made worse by the fact that most of the Gatlians are not very fun to use. Kenny is a generic pistol that does nothing interesting, Gus is a shotgun with an ammo capacity so limited that you will spend more time reloading than shooting, and Sweezy is an SMG that does so little damage per shot you will probably get bored and swap her out for Kenny. Of the four weapons only Creature is at all interesting, spawning small creatures that attack enemies, giving him the rare distinction of the best gun to use if your aim sucks.
The boring guns are helped a bit by having several upgrades and mods, as well as each one having a special “glob shot” that does something interesting in combat and aids in traversal outside of it. Still, it's hard to disguise the fact that you only have four guns, two of them are practically worthless, and the remaining two are not especially exciting to use. This isn't exactly Doom [2016] in terms of number of weapon options. Hell, it's pretty poor when compared to a bargain-basement Doom [2016] clone like Necromunda: Hired Gun [2021]. This is a very serious problem in a first-person shooter where the primary gameplay loop will be shooting enemies, if that becomes tedious which happens almost instantly in High on Life the game becomes boring.
Less forgivable than the minimal weapon variety is the downright pitiful enemy variety. There are only around ten different enemy types in the game, and more than a few of these feel like you're fighting the same guy with a little bit more health. There is no “wow” moment where the game introduces a deadly new enemy and you're left wondering how the hell will I be able to take this guy down. The closest you will come is when the game introduces a giant mook, but after a few minutes of fighting him you realize his attacks are easy to dodge and he's about as threatening as three regular minions taped together.
Frustratingly, the boss fights are actually pretty interesting for the most part, with each providing a nice mixture of mobility challenges and gunplay. All the special traversal methods of your guns come into play as you battle against these bosses, and the unique attack patterns of the bosses mean that they never blend in with the annoying goons. Where the hell is this imagination in the rest of the game? The only exception is the penultimate boss which falls flat on its face, in part due to trying to do too much. The game explicitly wants to create a surreal, psychological boss fight like Psycho Mantis from Metal Gear Solid [1998].
The hallucinations try to play on the player character's insecurities, but this doesn't work because the player character doesn't really have any characterization. The character is a blank slate for the player to project themselves onto, so if the player is like me (a middle-aged man who has long ago made peace with his relative insignificance in the cosmos) there really aren't any relevant insecurities to play off of. Maybe if I was playing this game at age 14 I would think it's the deepest thing ever, but I seem to recall having better taste in video games when I was in middle school. In any event, the result is a tedious boss battle broken up by a bunch of long dialogue sequences that don't make any sense because our character was never really established as having any characteristics.
High on Life may work for you as a comedy, humor is one of the most subjective things in the world. However, as a FPS it is generic and tedious, and if you, like me, find it sickeningly unfunny, then you will doubtlessly regard it as a massive waste of time.