Hands-On: High on Life 2 was our most pleasant Gamescom surprise
Squanch Games’s sequel already plays better and feels funnier than its predecessor
When it comes to the biggest video game disappointments so far this generation, High on Life is certainly up there.
I’m not the world’s biggest Rick and Morty fan – I’m one of those uppity folk who enjoyed it in the early days until its toxic fandom ruined it – but the idea of a comedy first-person shooter where your weapons spoke to you throughout was something I was completely sold on, right until the moment I played it.
It seems I wasn’t alone – the game currently sits at an underwhelming Metacritic score of 67, with the general consensus being that it laid on the comedy far too thickly and used it to deflect from what was a fairly dull shooter.
When Xbox asked me to try out High on Life 2 at Gamescom this year, then, I kept my expectations much lower this time around. An hour later, I left my appointment thoroughly excited to play more of it.
On paper, there isn’t much here that’s different. You’re still armed with a collection of talking weapons, including the returning Knifey, an endearingly enthusiastic knife with an Australian accent.
The game’s still rammed with jokes, and most of them are still in the Rick and Morty style – a lot of swearing, and a lot of loose, stammering improv-like delivery. The disgraced Justin Roiland may no longer have anything to do with it, having stepped down from Squanch Games nearly three years ago, but it’s still clearly cut from the same comedic cloth.
The main difference this time, however, is that whereas in the first game the humour took centre stage and got in the player’s way at times – there were too many instances of lengthy ‘witty’ conversations you couldn’t get away from – this time it feels more like the gameplay takes centre stage and the humour accompanies it.
The core gunplay feels a lot better too. Shooting enemies wasn’t particularly satisfying in the first game but the sequel has improved things substantially, to the point that when my demo threw me into a comedy deathmatch against a bunch of other bots, I took great pleasure in shooting them all down.
This section also featured one of my favourite chuckles, a boss fight against a chap with a suspiciously Silent Hill-like helmet. “Looks like that helmet is preventing you from shooting you in the head,” the game told me. “I guess it’s for more than copyright infringement.”
The boss fight itself isn’t particularly novel, once you figure out how to beat him (“you’re going to have to find some way to shoot off that triangularly-shaped helmet – it’s not a pyramid, do NOT call it a pyramid”), but the fact it was still fun enough meant the humour enhanced the experience. When the underlying game is better, the comedy lands better too because it no longer feels like a diversion tactic to distract from underwhelming gameplay.
“When the underlying game is better, the comedy lands better too because it no longer feels like a diversion tactic to distract from underwhelming gameplay.”
The deathmatch arena is part of MurderCon, an annual convention celebrating all things killy. MurderCon is one of the zones in ConCon, an even bigger convention celebrating conventions themselves. The demo I played had me making my way through ConCon in search of the evil Senator Muppy Doo, who I had to assassinate.
This involved starting off at ParkingCon (where I had to find a parking space by killing anyone claiming dibs on empty spots), then moving through the aforementioned MurderCon before reaching HumanCon, where the Senator can be found giving a speech.
Movement is aided by the addition of a skateboard – this lets you travel around quicker, grind on certain walls and even kick your board at enemies when you approach them. It makes moving around far more enjoyable, and adds some much-needed pace to the sequel.
It’s the demo’s final sequence, however, that truly won me over. During the boss fight with the Senator, at one point he shrinks himself down and enters your suit, essentially taking over the computer that’s running your brain.
I had no idea what to do and where to find him until a developer standing next to me pointed out the solution, which was so obvious it was genius – pause the game. This brings up the in-game menu, which is designed to look like part of your suit’s computer. Sure enough, there was the Senator, running around the game’s menu screens.
This led to a fun game of hide and seek where I had to chase him through my inventory menu and the Settings screen, while he messed up the options for game language, the gun chatter frequency, and the sliders controlling the suit’s vitals.
Eventually, to kill him once and for all, the game decides that you have to turn off your entire suit and reboot it. When you do, instead of booting up the suit’s operating system, you instead find yourself booting up the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis version of Bible Adventures, the religious platformer which has become something of a meme in recent years.
As the Senator then runs across the screen while Bible Adventures is playing, the decision is made to try to stab your own face in the hope you can hit him, leading to the frankly ridiculous sight of you trying to jam a knife into your own eyes while a tiny man runs across a genuine Mega Drive game from the early ’90s. This really wasn’t what I was expecting before I started the demo.
As soon as the demo was finished I asked the nearby developer how they managed to get Bible Adventures in there. “We’ve actually got a bunch of games in there,” he pointed out, noting that it was similar to the way the first game had a collection of full movies hidden in it, such as Tammy and the T-Rex and Vampire Hookers.
To prove it, he jumped back into the demo and skipped forward to the entrance of MurderCon. To the right of the registration booth is a small arcade, and if you go in there you can find an arcade cabinet running the Mega Drive / Genesis version of Radical Rex, an Australia-developed platformer starring a skateboard-riding dinosaur.
High on Life 2 is out in February 2026, and based on that hour-long session with it I’m significantly more excited about it than I was a few weeks ago.
The fact that the game itself – while certainly not revolutionary in any way – feels a lot more solid to play makes all the difference, and while there’s certainly no sign that it’s dialling back the humour it doesn’t feel quite as intrusive. The one-liners are snappier, the NPCs are funnier and I generally found myself laughing more during this hour than I did through the entirety of the first game.
Of course, it still remains to be seen whether the game will continue to keep up this momentum until the credits, or whether it opens well with this early sequence before running out of steam and outstaying its welcome. So far, though, I’m certainly high on High on Life 2’s potential.
