Turning off High On Life’s endless gun chatter reveals a more average rate of fire

When I previewed High On Life at Gamescom earlier this year, I walked away with a bit of a skip in my step. I thought Justin Roiland and Squanch Games might be winners. Talking space guns were never so annoying and gun battles sounded solid! It also appealed to the juvenile’s sense of humor. poo wee? Yeah, you’ll get a cheap chuckle from me. I then understood that it might not be for everyone, but hey, I can handle that if the FPS bit is good.

Having now spent a few hours with the last game, I concluded that my brain must have been chemically altered by the doner kebab I had the night before. You can turn off your gun’s verbal diarrhea through the game’s menu, but what you’ll find behind the brown curtain is a very unimaginative shooter. For a world so colorful and vibrant, it’s a pity no team FPS can match it.

If you don’t like Rick & Morty, you’ll despise High On Life. The game is a ship of Justin Roiland’s humor to assault your senses for ten hours, like the time you put on your new bounty hunter suit and malicious pop-ups invade your vision: “Extend your shlingas by 10 inches” and “MILFs in your zone,” with MILFs a bit of an expression of ” Malware that infects a lot of files” (ha). Periodically, you’ll come across bloated aliens called Clumnugg or Burpywurpy and they’ll swear a lot, commenting on how they screw themselves up, or trump the game’s mediocrity, as if drawing attention to it somehow makes said mediocrity a well-deliberate joke.

As someone who doesn’t mind Rick and Morty, there are times when High On Life makes me laugh, and I appreciate the wider scope of you, as an alien hunter, zipping among these weird alien planets to slash soft, partially thawed balls. A great sense of adventure begins when you step through a portal into a dusty desert world filled with sand frogs with spleen for tongues, or peer over a railing to see cars flying over a gray city. It can be hard to shake the constant noise of your guns, but I truly believe the world is an exciting place to inhabit.

The problem with weapons is that they’re effectively grafted to your wrist, and they rarely stop screaming. Turn off “Gun Chatter” in settings and it won’t make much difference. Kenny may not get hung up on your gun when you reload, but he’s still forced to interact with every stop story milestone – of which there are many. The most disturbing ones are the ones that have Jane, an ex-octahedral dirty hawk arguing with your sister, and these interactions are like scratching nails on a chalkboard that has been smashed over and over at a scraping knife on a plate. A lot of times, I scroll and scroll through TikTok on my phone during these moments. Yes, the damn social media platform really does replace High On Life (go watch JJ Curry Reviews, though, it creates real cinema).

But if you strip away all the insults and curses, it turns out to be a mediocre FPS at best. Despite Roiland and company’s ability to dream of huge, bustling Martian cities and globe islands, you never stand up to the same number of bad guys squabbling between each planet. Even more frustrating is your arsenal, which – along with one gun – is very eager to conform to beige FPS standards. Kenny is a laser gun, there’s a shotgun, there’s the famous Niddler heist from Halo. Only one actually behaves as an alien, extraterrestrial species, giving birth to predatory blue babies who cling to enemies and gnaw them to death.

Every weapon you have has an alternate fire that mixes things up a bit, I think. Like Kenny, whose Glob Shot sends his enemies flying through the air so you can “jump” them with more shots. But really, you can only shoot them a few times in a rather unsatisfying game of juggling. Mods can change the way your guns behave as well, but these are all fairly simple mods that focus on efficiency. I don’t care about efficiency and harm! Give me an irradiated bladder that douses enemies with boiling urine. Give me a deep club of meat that wriggles against skin and belches puddles of acidic jelly with every swing. just give me Something A little condiment We’re in a deranged world, right?

I’ve now gotten to the point where I sigh whenever the game expects me to fight. For an FPS, it’s not ideal when something you’re supposed to do often becomes tedious. And it’s not perfect when everything around it is tired, too. Shame.