High on Life Review PC Premium Game
0This game is enjoyable to play. If you are looking for a good video game, this is a great one to start with. Easy to learn, hard to master, and will keep you entertained for days. As you pick up the other Italians, the combat becomes more entertaining. The chameleon-like Gus makes for a serviceable shotgun with a disc alt-fire that you can rebound for extra hits. Sweezy, meanwhile, is an enjoyable replica of Halo's Needler, and the most effective weapon in the game. But Creature is again my favorite. He fires his children at enemies—small, colorful imps that latch themselves onto foes and bite them to death. He also has a useful alt-fire that temporarily turns enemies to your side. Proxy weapons are always hard to make satisfying, and Creature is a fine example of how to do it right.
By the time you acquire Creature, High on Life's arsenal is shaping up nicely. But outside of one last gallian unlocked for the final level, and your melee weapon Knifey, that's all the weapons you get. Even if High on Life was a great shooter, five guns aren't enough to sustain the fun for over 15 hours. And High on Life isn't close to being a great shooter, always favoring gimmicks over tight gunplay. Many enemies are covered in glop, which acts as armor that dissolves off them as you deal damage. It's a neat way of visualizing damage, but the act of killing enemies is loose and rubbery, especially the deeply awkward melee executions, which are like someone's puppeteering your character from a mile away. There's also nowhere near enough enemy variety, with half the roster comprising annoying bugs that scuttle along the ground, and floating drones that are equally arduous to fight.
The lack of weapon or enemy diversity is indicative of a broader issue, which is that High on Life runs out of ideas about halfway through. The first couple of missions takes you to some impressive locations. Well, one special location—a sprawling cyberpunk city that's built on the underside of an asteroid. The other main planet is an ugly purple forest world filled with legally distinct alien Care Bears who like everything else in this accursed game never stop talking. Nonetheless, it sets you up for a wild, planet-hopping adventure. But it turns out that you only ever hop between these two planets (and Blim city), with the second half of the game repeatedly bringing you back to these two locations. What new areas appear in the second half are significantly smaller than those seen in the first, with the game becoming increasingly reliant upon arena fights as it progresses.
At least these spaces are fun to navigate. Many of your weapons' alt-fire modes double as navigation tools. Gus's disc shot can embed in certain surfaces to create platforms, while Sweezy can create time-dilating bubbles that slow down spinning fans. Through these tools, the three planets unfold over time, revealing new pathways that'll lead you to sentient Luglox chests you can slash open for coins. None of this is spectacularly original, and there's a fuzziness to how your character moves that speaks to budget limitations. Still, High on Life is a better first-person platformer than it is a shooter. That's probably damning with faint praise, but faint praise is as good as you're going to get from me.