Review: High on Life 2 (PS5) – Slick Skateboarding and Shooting Suffocated by Poor Performance

High on Life was a Marmite game back when it launched in 2022.

Your enjoyment of the game was almost entirely dependent on whether you enjoyed the Rick and Morty-style humour from Squanch Games’ now disgraced founder Justin Roiland. He resigned from the studio in 2023, but Squanch Games hasn’t lost any of that style, crudeness, and satire in High on Life 2.

It’s managed to craft a much more exciting and fleshed out FPS, with stronger gameplay thanks to its unique blend of skateboarding and shooting, as well as a more exciting roster of weapons and locations.

But, the experience is let down by a pretty frustrating set of performance and quality issues on PS5 and PS5 Pro that actually make High on Life 2 look and play worse than the first game at times.

High on Life 2 picks up right where the first game left off, with a few returning Gatlians (your talking weapons), Lizzie, and Gene. The set-up and structure of High on Life 2 isn’t much different from the first game with you exploring a variety of alien locations, taking down key bosses, although this time instead of a cartel, you are taking down key figures running and funding big-pharma company Rhea Pharmaceuticals.

However, you have now made a name for yourself by taking down the G3 cartel and are being chased by other bounty hunters, after a bounty is placed on your head, alongside Lizzie’s as she has become a freedom fighter of sorts. So interrupting your efforts to take down Rhea, you will have some bounty hunters try and kill you across the game’s various, diverse planets and locales.

Overall, there isn’t much beyond that to the story or the characters here, similar to the first game. But there doesn’t need to be as the voice cast, writing, and comedy throughout are excellent and as someone who really enjoyed High on Life’s comedy and writing, the sequel is on par, if not better almost constantly.

The humour hits harder, the satire is perfectly on the nose, and the performances from newcomers like Galactus, played by Ralph Ineson, really helps bolster the already impressive writing and comedy the series is known for.

However, if you couldn’t stand the writing, jokes, or characters in the original, the sequel isn’t going to get you on board.

Speaking of getting on a board, High on Life 2’s big gameplay hook is the ability to skateboard while shooting. It’s an insane idea when you think about it because the precise aiming of an FPS and the pace of riding around on a skateboard shouldn’t mix, but Squanch Games has done a remarkable job at blending these two aspects of the game together.

Skateboarding feels effortless, breezy, and natural — and it quickly becomes muscle memory to always keep moving while in a firefight. The level design is also built around this with rails, fences, wires, balconies, ramps, and jumps to grind on or use in combat and when exploring the planets or hunting down the various collectibles scattered around the maps.

It helps too that the roster of weapons this time around is far more varied and exciting, with the game handing out new guns at a more consistent pace. High on Life 2 ensures that for almost every target you have a new toy to play with, even if it isn’t a gun, as there are objects and animals you can pick up and use as weapons like a fire turtle that spews flames out in front of you.

The game’s best moments are where it makes use of the skateboard to craft some exhilarating and exciting boss battles that you haven’t experienced anywhere else. The game’s final boss is especially great.

But, unfortunately almost all of this is marred by what can only be described as a rough experience on PS5 and PS5 Pro when it comes to the game’s visuals and graphics. While High on Life 2 keeps the same visually striking, colour-injected art style of the original game, the game actually looks rather muddy and ugly because of a variety of visual quality choices and performance targets that coalesce together to create a perfect storm of problems.

The first big problem is that the game has no performance or graphics settings, besides a render scaling option, as well as upscaling options on PS5 Pro (although both these options have barely any effect on the game’s visuals). High on Life 2 is constantly trying to maintain 60fps, and doesn’t always hit it, dropping pretty consistently on PS5 and even at times on PS5 Pro. Because of this the resolution is reduced substantially, running at about 720p or 792p on PS5 Pro, according to Digital Foundry.

This low resolution and the upscaling options both create a grainy visual experience with a lot of noise in the environment, on weapons, on character models, and even on the UI. It’s a little better in the closed off, interior environments, but High on Life 2 has a lot of open spaces and the game is just not pleasant to look at most of the time as the visual fidelity is so poor. Some noticeable pop-in issues also appear throughout the game and these make it hard to track enemies or projectiles in boss fights as there is so much going on that the visual fidelity can’t keep up with.

This is worsened by a lot of design choices that highlight Unreal Engine 5’s issues. One key choice Squanch Games has made is to use a lot of reflective surfaces that display blobby reflections that don’t look attractive at all and often don’t resemble what they should be reflecting. They largely just distract and worsen the muddy, hazy look of the game. We would have rather taken better visual fidelity over reflections that don’t feel needed.

High on Life 2 also uses screen-space shadows which pop up and disappear depending on the angle and direction you’re looking. But these are used everywhere giving the feeling that the pop-in is actually worse because slight adjustments of the camera can cause shadows to appear and disappear constantly.

It all comes together to create a melting pot of graphical issues that make High on Life 2 look worse than it actually is, and playing it can be disorientating because so much is going on visually at any one time.