High On Life 2 Review

High On Life was originally released at the tail end of 2022. Only 3 years and a few months later, the sequel High On Life 2 is now here. The first game dove into making a shooter with comedy as the focus. Will the second one shift its focus?

Game Name: High on Life 2
Platform(s): PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC
Reviewed On: PC
Developer(s): Squanch Games
Publisher(s): Squanch Games
Release Date: February 13th, 2026
Price: $59.99

High On Life 2 takes place a certain amount of time after the first game. We don’t get a full breakdown, but it does have a montage that makes it feel years later. You are now a renowned Bounty Hunter known to all as being the one who destroyed the drug cartel trafficking humans. As you start get comfy in your life of fame, terrible news breaks out. Your sister has a bounty on her head, and it is a high one.  After you take the bounty and try to get some answers, you discover something horrible. The drugs the cartel was trafficking were not lost when you destroyed them. It is now being run with a legitimate pharmacy working on trying to legitimize it at the government level. You now have to take on a foe larger than just a drug cartel: Big Pharma.

Different Story, Same Setup

After you get a new base and some new gear, not operated by a giant Bounty Hunter network trying to track you down and kill you, things become much more like the first game structurally. You choose a bounty to go after and try to find more suits that are trying to lobby the government to reduce humanity to becoming the next animal farmed for servitude. High On Life 2 has around the same amount of content as the first game, too. Short and sweet if you rush things, or it can be a bit longer as you wait to hear every single line of dialogue from your guns or the people in the level.

Even if you do have the same setup, gameplay is enhanced this time around. The first big enhancement is the skateboard. Early on, you will fight a bounty hunter with a skateboard called Reptical. After you beat him, you steal his skateboard. Whenever you press the sprint key, instead of running, your guy will hop on the skateboard and fly through the level. You can jump on rails to grind them. If you run into an enemy, you can do a kickflip to hurt them and keep your momentum. It changes how mobs work since you can now use the skateboard as a way to keep your distance and dodge incoming attacks. Or you can try to be a menace and throw yourself into multiple kickflips as you ping pong from the enemy. As long as you retain momentum, it keeps the gameplay at a solid pace.

Similar to the first game, the characters that have the most to say in this game are the guns. They will answer every question for you, and also talk your ear off. They also have a variety of abilities you can use. One gun operates similarly to a normal submachine gun, just shooting bullets. You can hold the alternate fire to charge a bullet to shoot at the enemies. The charge shot has better aim as it reduces the reticle size. Another gun has a shotgun-style spread. Depending on which gun you have out, it also changes how that weapon speaks for you. Choose the weapon you want to use not just based on how it performs, but also how it reacts to dialogue and cinematics. Each weapon also has a special ability known as a trickshot. One can form a time bubble that slows enemies to a crawl, one can shoot giant discs, and there is even one that can shoot a baby to mind control your opponents.

Visualizing High On Life 2

I was surprised to see, looking at other reviews of High On Life 2, people having a lot of performance issues on their PC’s. On my system, I was able to run at a locked 120 FPS at 1080p. The textures and the detail were all in high quality, and it looked really clean. Playing the game was smooth, skating and grinding on rails was fast, and I didn’t have any issues with stutters or the like. The game does require a bit of time to compile the shaders on bootup, but once they are compiled, you are good to go. Note that a patch went out on February 20th that was meant to help with the technical issues. Not sure if they helped other systems, but since mine didn’t have any issues, it didn’t matter to me.

System Specs
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4080 Super
32GB DDR5 RAM

Comedy Focus

When I stated that the first High on Life was focused on comedy, I meant that in the story, and the gunplay was more geared towards being funny than being engaging. Some really did not like this, as they were hoping for a more central shooter experience. It was short, especially if you didn’t listen to the voice lines or engage with its world. High On Life 2 is similar in that it can be short if you don’t engage with its world and levels, but a key difference is that not only is it funny, it has better gunplay and a more polished system overall. The guns you get access to all have their own personality and will talk to you as you are traversing the levels. They can still make things annoying as they say similar things over and over about you hopping on your skateboard, or if you are looking at the map, they will get upset with you for standing around. This game feels like it is the game they wanted to make originally. There are some really funny moments, and it even has some cool level concepts. That stated, it still isn’t going to be your hardcore shooter that some fans want out of first-person games.

I think High On Life 2 is a better package than the original, and also, since there isn’t too heavy a focus on the story in the first game, it isn’t one that you have to necessarily play through first. There are easter eggs, references, and characters from the first game that pop up, but they just add familiarity to the world and your character’s connections more than they add narrative impact to the game as a whole.

One problem I had with the game is that the defaults don’t have subtitles on the game. Which is fine, as I imagine some people don’t need to see all the subtitles of everyone speaking all the time, but it did make it annoying to try to figure out who said what in a storm of conversation. Also, I love taking screenshots of funny jokes, but it isn’t as fun to look back on when there is no subtitle in the image. I recommend turning on subtitles for that.

A Stronger High On Life

If you enjoyed the comedy approach to a shooter’s experience of the first, then High On Life 2 is a game geared towards you. The humor itself I don’t find as rambunctious as the first, but I also got some nice chuckles and heavy laughs out of the jokes and the experiences this title provided. If you are looking for a game that is more on the hardcore shooter path, where you can disassemble a large army of monsters, then this game will be fun, but it will also be disappointing at times. I enjoyed High On Life 2 and the experience it curated for me. I think it is a game that rose above the first in terms of execution and polish.

High On Life 2 is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

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Review Disclosure Statement: High On Life 2 was provided to us by Squanch Games for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy.