High on Life Review

For a guy who knows nothing about Rick and Morty and it's creator, I found this to be a decent and enjoyable time, was it worth paying full price especially considering I bought it on PS5 and got it because I liked how the game looked? Probably not, is it a good game to get on a sale or "free" on Games Pass, definately. I mainly got the game because somehow a single player AAA FPS title with no open world or online elements actually got made in today's day and age, and that was enough to make me check it out.

On to the game itself, best way of describing it is that what if Oddworld a Stranger's Wrath, Halo, New Doom were blended together? You basically get this game. You have the the elements of your weapons being "alive" and the bounty system of Stranger's Wrath, the regen health, enemy line up and reloading of Halo and the fast movement, hold all your weapons and "glory kills" of New Doom.

Moment to moment combat is solid and enjoyable with decent weapon feedback for firing your gun and decent damage animations when you kill your enemies, even though the combat itself lacks depth due to reasons I will go more into later, the act of causing carnage was handled well enough to make me see the game through to the end but at the same time the game just has one major issue that prevents combat from anything more than "decent fun" and that is the enemy roster. The game basically uses the Halo enemy roster where so many of the enemies use guns and they strafe side to side while occasionally shooting projecticles at you and you also have the series' trademark regen health, where enemies come in different sizes like small, medium and large, the issue is that unlike Halo where you have a two weapon limit and ammo had to either be collected or swapped entirely, in High on Life, all the guns have unlimited ammo where the only drawback is that you have to reload. Partner that with New Doom glory kill system and many of the battles consist of me using Gus upclose and then getting a scripted melee kill.

Also unlike Halo, certain guns don't have a high damage to flesh and shields, and since High on Life doesn't have this and let's you carry all your guns, this means nothing stops you from spamming Gus' shotgun blasts and you can take more damage than you can in Halo so basically combat is just fire, fire, reload, melee kill, get shot, occascionally take damage, and then wait for health to regen. Since so many of the enemies are like this, I had no reason to use no other gun than Gus.

A Doom Eternal style system where enemies are weaker to certain guns could've greatly have enhanced the basic combat the game has since it complements the fact that guns have unlimited ammo and you can hold all of them.

To this game's credit, the game does break up the pace with platforming and some occasional puzzle solving which does help break up combat and prevents the game from being way too monotonous. The game could've used some of the gun abilities a lot more like Sweezy's alt fire and the magnet boots.

Also, the game also felt like it was running out of money when the Blim City invasion happened because then you are going back to old levels that are barely any different from each other.

Another credit to the game that the bosses while easy are more creative and have better geniune challenge than a lot of FPS bosses especially before the days of Doom 2016, you got to at the very least dodge attacks and recognize patterns instead of spamming your strongest weapon and tank hits and then win.

The story and writing is okay, it was the game's selling point but I found the story decent but I did wish the guns and enemies would shut up since the talk way too much. The game does try too hard to be funny at times but the overall story is okay I did like characters like Gene and the main story moments between all the guns and their banter. It's nothing special but it is engaging enough for an FPS story.

Overall, High on Life was a decent time even if I feel like a couple of change and refinements could make a game I highly reccomend as a standalone game rather than a solid Game Pass "freebie".