High On Life Reviews

  • Lord GlennLord Glenn373,431
    21 Jan 2023
    10 16 4
    Boring, horribly overrated game - even if you are a Rick and Morty fan.

    This is a placeholder review until someone who cares writes a real review.

    This is a 'comedy' FPS set in a world not unlike the world of Rick and Morty but seemingly with no crossover at all beyond depicting crazy kooky alien beings who speak candidly across a (small) variety of sci-fi environments. Essentially Justin Roiland (in Morty voice) is your companion talking gun, leading you on a mostly linear adventure, shooting aliens, bosses, collectibles etc.

    Graphics are fine, 3D cartoonish, nothing spectacular but perfectly adequate.

    As you progress you can dash, grapple, power slide and use a jet pack. Controls are tight enough, no complaints there and you do eventually have a variety of weapons and personal upgrades that make traversal of small but complex environments pretty fun and satisfying after a few hours.

    The shooting however is very simplistic - unsatisfying kills and quiet squelchy and zappy sound effects make combat very, very tedious after a short time. Limited, ineffective enemies are a chore to kill, offering no real threat whatsoever but this is not a game meant to appeal to Doom or CoD fans so not an issue for me personally, it's just not good gameplay, it's basic.

    As a huge R&M fan I am surely the target audience for this game but I have had to abandon it around half way through because ironically, it is the humour that kills it. The issue that comes with 'haha we are so self-referential and meta' type humour is that it risks becoming the kind of thing it purports to parody. It's so determined to be funny that it prioritizes telling its story over and above your experience of the game.

    I won't give any examples lest I risk what could be considered a spoiler but put it this way, you will be forced multiple times to engage in long, loooooooong conversations with various characters. Mostly unskippable, they also have the incredibly annoying 'feature' of limiting your movement so you can't even jump around and amuse yourself while you are waiting for the boring exposition and 'hilarious' conversations to end. I'm not talking JRPG level, but more than long enough to make you wish you hadn't bothered.

    There is one small, somewhat infamous segment where you are forced to do some paperwork in an office. All you have to do is press a few buttons to complete each page of work. It's simple, not meant to be a test but the JOKE is the thing - the joke is 'haha, you're playing a game but now you have to do boring paperwork' - Fine, good joke. The problem is that the joke goes on for too long. After a few of these pages, you realise the joke is actually 'Haha, you are doing work in a video game and just like real work it goes on for a long time, lol!' Fine, still a good joke... but then it just keeps going, long enough to become incredibly annoying which was no doubt by design. This whole segment maybe takes as little as two minutes but ALL it does is bore you and annoy you, so it seems much longer than it even is.

    In the end, I found myself in one boring, unskippable conversation too many and have uninstalled.

    I am sure many players will enjoy the humour and the relative chill not offered by majority of shooters but for me it was an empty, vapid experience that I will not repeat.

    Achievement wise there are several 'true missables' that would require you to restart the game and play again shoul you miss them so consult a guide if needs be. Personally, I think missable acheivements are a failure of design, this game does not have any kind of branching paths and simply does not deserve a second playthrough.

    I think this game would have worked much better as a Rick and Morty adventure. It comes off as kind of R&M fan fiction version of an episode that was never made.

    I really don't mind getting downvoted and or even yelled at by anyone put out by my negative review. It's not a good game and that it was even in the running for Game of the Year just goes to show what low standards many gamers have these days.
    2.5
    Showing all 4 comments.
    GreatMistYTNo you're right and you should say it. I got to the first boss fight, 9-Torg I think? Anyways at that point the style of humor had already worn thin, even though I put the "Spontaneous Monologue" setting to low. The shooting was even more thin and the mechanics felt baseline. I'm glad someone else thought similarly
    Posted by GreatMistYT On 24 Jan at 06:34
    SPΛΙΝΤΞRCΞΛΛEven if I disagree with you generally, this is your point of view and you do have arguments.

    I agree with you though in that it is overated, kinda boring and that it doesnt deserve a second playthrough.

    It was very fun for me, as long as it lasted and I took actions to avoid missing achievements and stuff. I "stalked" the forums and guides two weeks before starting it.

    I would buy a DLC. For me it was a unique, but short and sometimes annoying experience.
    Posted by SPΛΙΝΤΞRCΞΛΛ On 27 Jan at 18:08
    FruitofPassionAs someone not that familiar with R&M, I thought it was alright. Definately some annoying "shut up" moments, but I turned down the frequency of talking in the settings which made it reasonable for me.

    I was quite surprised actually at how good the game looks and runs for a last gen console so I give it credit for that. I had a decent amount of moments that made me laugh, enough to say I had fun overall.

    The real problem with me actually, and feel pretty alone on this though, is just the overly excessive amount of vulgarity. I can't stand people who talk this way. It's not the swearing in general I have a problem with, I don't care. But when it becomes "I can't finish a f***ing sentence without a f***ing cuss word thrown in there you f***ing b**ch," and that's how absolutely everybody talks, it gets incredibly annoying.
    Posted by FruitofPassion On 29 Jan at 23:57
    Frankie DrumsNYI'm about 25 hours in and just need to find the last few chests and grind out some kills to 100% the game. I'm absolutely sick of the "comedy." I don't watch Rick & Morty so at first I found the humor funny as this was fresh to me, but as FruitofPassion points out above, when every single character talks the same way it gets old very quick. As Lord Glenn mentions, the unskippable conversations--particularly between your sister Lizzie and Gene--are just tedious and don't do anything to raise the stakes of the game. This goes further in the late game when your guns are talking to each other and I just didn't care about the plot "twist" or any of the "dramatic" elements. The game suddently wanted to take itself seriously and deal with topics of genocide and human experimentation but the over-the-top-everything-is-a-joke atmosphere completely contradicted this.

    Once you strip away the game's personality, this review is correct: you're left with a shallow generic shooter…and that's it. The lack of an ingame map is frustrating in the "everything looks the same" jungle region. The endless waves of aliens get tiring, especially as you almost finish clearing out a base and then your gun remarks, "Oh what? ANOTHER wave?" as 5 more enemies teleport in. Yes, my sentiments exactly. There were several instances where the game locks you in a room and throws wave after wave of enemies at you, which is arguably the laziest possible type of level design. Since you don't receive any rewards from killing enemies, by the end of the game I ran past enemies that I didn't need to kill for the Bounty Hunter forums achievement, and if you're avoiding shooting enemies in a shooter…that tells you everything you need to know about the game.
    Posted by Frankie DrumsNY On 06 Mar at 13:45
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