The original High On Life was a divisive game to say the least. Here at Pure Xbox, our resident reviewer gave us one of the most well-known (and beloved!) PX reviews in history when they dished out a "Poor" 4/10 score and concluded that "you're either going to love it or hate it, really" — something that's definitely rung true over the past few years.
I'm personally heading into High on Life 2 as someone that was actually in the "love it" camp, or at least someone who enjoyed the first game and particularly its "High On Knife" DLC. So, am I still feeling the same way after a few hours with High on Life 2? The answer is yes — and it's also reminded me a little bit of the Xbox exclusive Sunset Overdrive.
If you've played the original game or seen anything of it, you pretty much know the score here. It's got the same style of humour, the combat feels very familiar, and there's a nice mix of open-world exploration and closed-off level design.
This time around, the story is about how humans are being targeted by "Big Pharma" as part of a plan to harvest and shrink them into an easily digestible pill for aliens, and therefore it's your job to (again) save the human race. There are plenty of references to the first game, including a literal museum of artifacts that you can visit, but you don't need to have seen that one through to completion to understand High on Life 2's premise early on.
It's all very much as you'd expect from a High on Life title, aside from one key difference — there's a skateboard mechanic now. This is actually an integral part of the game, allowing you to traverse the environment at speed while also latching onto a massive array of rails that you can grind to your heart's content. Not only does this speed up traversal in general, but it provides added depth and strategy to combat encounters where you can use speed and trickery to get an advantage on slower opponents.
You can see how skateboarding works in the trailer below:
This is basically what Sunset Overdrive was doing very successfully back in 2014, but its implementation in High on Life 2 is first-person-based, rather than third-person. It definitely adds a much-needed uniqueness to this sequel compared to the original title, and personally, I've spent most of the first few hours on my board rather than off it.
Altogether, High on Life 2 is exactly what I expected after 3-4 hours of gameplay so far, aside from the aforementioned skateboard mechanic that I'm also having a lot of fun with. Most of my time has been with the Xbox Series X version, which doesn't look outstanding but not terrible either, and the most important thing is that it's running at a very solid 60FPS — or at least my VRR-supported display isn't making any frame drops noticeable.
On the ROG Xbox Ally X, it looks pretty bad by default, but I've managed to get a much better solution by tinkering with the settings. My favoured setup right now is all "Medium" graphics at 720p with Temporal Super Resolution turned on. You can definitely go 1080p with higher visual settings if you want to, but that'll likely require capping the performance to 30FPS. This is evidently quite a demanding game!
High on Life 2 officially releases on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass later today, and my advice is that if you enjoy or at least can tolerate the style of humour, it's well worth a download. It gets an extra special recommendation for Sunset Overdrive fans — hopefully you'll feel the inspiration like I did!