High on Life 2 review for PC, PS5, Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox Series X

Having only played a tiny bit of the first High on Life, I went into High on Life 2 with only a vague idea of what to expect. I knew there’d be a lot of shooting, a lot of swearing, and a lot of insanity, but I didn’t know what else there was to the game.

Turns out, that’s all I needed to know, because that’s pretty much the game in a nutshell. While there are a few moments here and there where High on Life 2 slows down for stuff like plot and character development, those moments aren’t the point of the game. The point, as we’ve established, is to tear your way through enemies, making all kinds of crude jokes, and basically going all out for the dozen-plus hours it’ll take you to beat the game.

Did I mention that I say that in the most loving way possible? Because High on Life 2 is awesome fun.

It more or less scratches the same itch that Gori: Cuddly Carnage did for me a few years ago. It feels like a throwback to an earlier age when games didn’t try to be so serious, and were willing to be as over-the-top as possible just for the sake of being that way.

A big part of why I’m such a fan of High on Life 2 is that it’s always pushing you to move forward, and it makes it awfully easy to do that in a literal sense by equipping you with a skateboard. While you’re not quite literally flying, it feels almost that way because of how smoothly you get to skate all over the world. There’s something deeply pleasing about facing down an army of enemies, and zipping around them as you pick them off one by one.

I also love how colourful the game is. Again, in a world that so often seems averse to bright, vivid hues – and I’m not just talking about video games here – there’s something refreshing about the way High on Life 2 uses a full colour palette to create a crazy alien world.

And, of course, there’s the combat. It works in High on Life 2 because it doesn’t require a tonne of precision – which is a good thing, because that would be hard on a skateboard. The whole ethos here is to move fast and kill everything, and the weapons here allow you to do that with ease.

Is it a deep experience? Of course not. But it’s not trying to be. High on Life 2 just aims to be as absurd and as fun as possible, and it succeeds on that at every level.

Squanch Games provided us with a High on Life 2 PC code for review purposes.

Click Here to buy High on Life 2 on Amazon