High On Life 2 Review – More Talking Guns, More Alien Weirdness

High On Life 2 has a Justin Roiland-shaped hole in it, and the question everyone’s asking is whether Squanch Games managed to fill it. Roiland resigned in early 2023 following misconduct allegations, and veteran voice actor Richard Kind (of A Bug’s Life and Curb Your Enthusiasm fame) stepped in to replace him as the voice of Kenny, your primary talking gun companion. At $59.99 for a 10-15 hour comedic FPS, here’s our verdict on whether High On Life 2 lands its jokes and its shots.

We covered initial reactions when the game was first shown — see our High On Life 2 first impressions piece for context on what was promised versus what shipped.

The Comedy: Hit and Miss in Equal Measure

Let’s address the biggest change first. Richard Kind’s Kenny sounds different — warmer, less manic, more like a neurotic uncle than Roiland’s unhinged improvisation. Whether this is an upgrade depends entirely on your comedy preferences. Kind brings better comedic timing and more emotional range, particularly during the game’s surprisingly sincere story beats about the bounty hunter’s legacy. What he lacks is the chaotic energy that made the original’s humor feel like it could go anywhere at any moment.

The writing is sharper in some areas and lazier in others. Squanch Games doubled down on meta-humor and fourth-wall breaks — your guns comment on game design tropes, NPCs mock fetch-quest structures while giving you fetch quests, and one extended sequence parodies live-service gaming with a fake battle pass that unlocks increasingly useless cosmetics. When this material lands, it’s genuinely funny. When it doesn’t, it feels like the game is congratulating itself for being self-aware without actually doing anything clever with that awareness.

The Epstein joke that’s generated media attention is emblematic of the game’s comedy approach: provocative for the sake of provocation, landing differently depending on your tolerance for edgy humor in a cartoon-styled shooter. Your mileage will vary enormously.

Gunplay: Talking Weapons That Actually Feel Good to Shoot

Where High On Life 2 unambiguously improves on its predecessor is combat. The original had a common criticism that the actual shooting felt floaty and imprecise. The sequel addresses this head-on. Each talking gun now has distinct weight, recoil patterns, and secondary fire modes that create genuine tactical decisions. Creature, the sentient alien shotgun, can now swallow enemies and spit them back as projectile weapons. Gus, the shotgun-type weapon, has a charged disc throw that pins enemies to walls.

Boss fights are a particular highlight. Each bounty target has multiple phases that force you to swap between your weapon loadout, and the guns banter with each other and the bosses during these encounters. A fight against a reality-warping alien DJ who keeps remixing the arena layout while your guns argue about music taste is one of the most entertaining boss encounters in any FPS this year.

Performance: The Elephant in the Server Room

And then there’s the performance, which is — to borrow the game’s own vocabulary — absolutely horrible. High On Life 2 runs on Unreal Engine 5, and it showcases everything wrong with UE5 optimization in 2026. On PC, even high-end hardware (RTX 4080, Ryzen 7 7800X3D) can’t maintain a stable 60fps at 4K. Frame drops into the low 50s are routine during combat encounters with multiple enemies, and the game’s vibrant alien environments seem to trigger aggressive shader compilation stutters during first traversal of new areas.

Console performance is marginally better but still inconsistent. PS5 targets 60fps in performance mode but regularly dips during particle-heavy sequences. The Xbox Series X version has noticeable texture pop-in that persists even after the day-one patch. AI pathfinding bugs cause enemies to clip through geometry or get stuck on environmental objects, and a widely reported boss respawn bug forces players to restart entire encounters when a boss gets stuck in its death animation loop.

The critic-audience score split tells the story: DualShockers gave it 95/100 and Gameliner 90/100, but PC Gamer panned it, and the Steam user rating sits at 65% Mixed with a Metacritic user score of 5.8 versus a critic average of 72. Critics who played on review builds with performance patches had a fundamentally different experience from players dealing with the retail release’s technical state.

Content and Value at $60

The 10-15 hour campaign is dense with content. Side bounties, collectible alien artifacts, and optional challenge rooms provide reasons to explore beyond the critical path. The hub world — an expanded version of the original’s suburban alien neighborhood — is packed with interactive details and NPC conversations that evolve as the story progresses. It’s not an open world, but the semi-linear structure gives you enough freedom to feel like you’re choosing your path through the alien underworld.

At $59.99, the value proposition hinges on whether the comedy resonates with you. If you bounced off the first game’s humor, nothing here will convert you. If you enjoyed it, there’s a better game wrapped around similar comedy — just one that currently runs worse than it should.