High on Life 2 - Not Much Higher (Review)
- James Stephanie Sterling
- 9 minutes ago
- 7 min read
High on Life 2 Released: February 13th, 2026 Developer: Squanch Games Publisher: Squanch Games Systems: PC, PS5 (reviewed), Xbox X/S
High on Life 2 isn’t something I expected to see. It’s not that I didn’t think they could do it without Justin Roiland, whose alleged abuses were released just before the first game was, I just didn’t think anybody would want to make it. The original was quickly forgotten despite being decent, but I suppose stranger sequels have happened.
Squanch Games has released this sequel to what feels like very little fanfare, or certainly not the same level of publicity as last time. Sadly, the actual game doesn’t carry itself with much pomp either - it’s not bad and the story’s much more memorable than last time, but the overall production feels hollow. It’s hard not to notice a significant reduction in terms of both quality and quantity, even if it boasts everso slightly more of an enjoyable campaign than before.
While I won’t pretend I never found Justin Roiland's work funny, High on Life 2 got more laughs out of me than High on Life and the voice acting’s no worse for his absence. In fact, Squanch's more overt attempts to explicitly replicate him, including some inauthentic moments of ad-libbing and corpsing, are the parts that fall flattest. Conversely, the proper jokes can be pretty good (and I'm a sucker for the inclusion of a Spirit Halloween managed by John Waters).
High on Life 2 is mostly content to reiterate on its predecessor. It plays the same, flaws and all, with a plot that hits familiar but better written story beats. That’s not to say it doesn’t do anything new, but most changes to the formula are lateral at best. High on Life could have done with several significant improvements, and sadly those same improvements are conspicuously absent in the followup.
High on Life 2 also feels like only half a game, something that ran out of money or time quite a while before it wrapped.
Plot wise, human beings are going to be turned into drugs again, this time by a pharmaceutical company with authority and publicity on its side. Our silent protagonist, now intergalactically famed as the G3 Killer, goes from bounty hunter to bounty hunted in the process of aiding their freedom fighting sister, and from there it’s another round of killing conspirators to save your species. Oh, and your talking guns - sans Kenny - are back to run their mouths. Loudly. Often.
Your arsenal of Gatlians is creative but wildly unbalanced. You start with two returning characters - the “shotgun” Gus, who remains relatively viable throughout, and Sweezy, who’s rather ineffectual even after some upgrades. Later on you’ll reunite with Creature, whose gimmick of spawning baby monsters for gradual damage is just as cool as last time… and just as disappointing, too.
Every debuting Gatlian is such an improvement it single-triggeredly renders the old ones obsolete, and they’re also unequal amongst themselves. Travis performs similarly to Sweezy but eclipses her in every way. Sheathe is the first gun in the series to pack a real punch, behaving like a burst rifle with accurate, impactful, and damaging shots. Bowie, whose name tells you exactly what he does, suffers from a slow rate of fire but at least has a great slowdown ability - yes, that’s also Sweezy’s gimmick, and yes, Bowie’s is better.
Travis eventually pairs up with his wife Jan, at which point the discrepancy becomes so great it can’t be ignored. With a gun in each hand, you basically deal twice as much damage as you can with anything else, and the only reason to change your gun is for flavor or the occasional puzzle requiring a particular Gatlian. It’s remarkable how unbalanced your inventory is, especially in a game that sells itself on the diverse personalities of its weapons.
Oh, you also get a knockoff Gravity Gun from Half-Life 2, one that manages to take a classic weapon and make it dull, ineffective, and frequently unable to grab objects without immediately throwing them at nothing.
Conceptually, the new Gatlians are great. Sheathe isn’t a true member of the species, being a decapitated head grafted to a regular gun. He’s also voiced by one of my favorite actors, Ralph Ineson, so I like him a lot. Adding a bow is simply a solid idea, and dual-wielding a married couple is an inspired one that I completely love. Travis and Jan are easily the most fun characters, and they have something resembling an arc. They’re hands down the highlight of the sequel.
High on Life 2 also adds a skateboard for enhanced traversal, and I really like it for the most part. There’s something quite pleasant about the floaty feel of the board, and it’s satisfying to make use of the liberally distributed grind rails and ramps. The extra speed is welcome and I found myself idly skating around simply for enjoyment. It's fun enough that I had a better time overall than with the last game.
Boarding’s held back by unresponsive controls that sometimes don’t seem to work and some wonky physics snarls. This isn’t usually a massive problem until it comes up in missions, where a few of the more intricate skateboard sections can be screwed over by a sudden lack of momentum or a jump not registering.
Mobility is an intended factor of combat, but enemies run around so erratically and accuracy comes at such a premium that trying to add wall running or grinding into the mix is distinctly unappealing to me. Strafing doesn’t do anything to avoid incoming damage and dodging only really avoids melee attackers, but I’d rather eat every shot than try to keep track of enemies while unreliably skating around.
Combat is a largely unsatisfying affair. Fights are a mess of colors and yelling, worsened by an overall sloppy quality and barely any audiovisual feedback on your shots. Enemies are dumb, everything is tanky, and boss fights in particular are repetitive slogs that last at least twice as long as they should. Like last time, there’s a distinct lack of impact, both when dishing out attacks and receiving them.
Puzzles are numerous and boring, so much so that I went into the final mission fully aware I’d left upgrades behind. I didn’t want to spend yet more time ferrying sentient blocks around or playing join-the-dots with power sources. These segments are slow, awkward, dull, and too many. Sadly, they’re most of the optional content.
Finding stuff to do between missions is hard because there’s just not all that much. Gag sequences are scattered around alongside a smattering of optional objectives, but they come off like token obligations half the time. There are cosmetics for you and your skateboard, but not very many of them. You can visit a few shops, but most of them have only a couple of items apiece if they have anything at all. You can explore several open maps, but doing so leads to a whole lot of empty space and dead ends.
At least this game is sometimes better at letting you know when you can’t access an optional area yet. Sometimes. Other times, it’ll mark side content on the map hours before it’s even spawned. I spent far too long looking for a wanted poster that just wasn’t there.
Side material - and even some of the main stuff - is so threadbare I could believe its development was abandoned partway through. Many story missions feel shallow and small, adding a constant sense of unrealized ambition. I wouldn't even mind a smaller game too much if it had been paced accordingly, but the decimated production value is absolutely obvious. This is punctuated by how abruptly the final mission arrives, which it does so much sooner than it did in the last game.
High on Life 2 was clearly made with fewer resources than its predecessor. Not only does it feel half as fleshed out, its quality as a product is several huge steps down. I’ve had to reload checkpoints multiple times due to a variety of soft locks - story events not triggering, NPCs not moving, combat sequences not finishing despite a lack of enemies, that kind of shit.
At the conclusion of all this is one hell of a rushed and flimsy finale that betrays how cheap things are. Like the b-movies this series likes to show in-universe, High on Life 2 doesn’t so much end as simply stop.
There are jokes that landed well and I enjoyed some of the fluffy nonsense you get out of random NPCs. Considering how much of the main campaign consists of that exact same fluff, it’s pretty much the main attraction. Lengthy dialog scenes and extended jokes serve as essential padding for a game that wouldn’t have much to show without it, far more obviously than with the previous entry.
The game itself agrees. At the very end, it admits there’s no postgame and that you may have done all the optional stuff as you went along. It makes fun of lackluster and missing content throughout the campaign. It burns through good story threads without giving them time to develop, even while it behaves as if there’s time to waste. There’s no way Squanch Games can be satisfied with how this turned out.
I’m willing to bet High on Life 2 does not reflect whatever Squanch envisioned for it. I could practically smell the cutbacks and downscaling as I traipsed through a world that promised much more than it delivered, unraveling a story full of setpieces that didn’t come close to reaching their potential. It has funny moments, some great concepts, and it's better than the original in a few key areas, but the substance is in short supply. It's a step forward for something that's a step back.
5.5/10
