Game news Is High on Life what shooters needed?
The current shooter sensation is High On Life. A game which however, does not seduce by its shooting mechanics. What are the reasons for its success?
The parents are gone, the house is yours and your sister is about to organize the party of her life after sticking a sachet of powder in her nose. But now a slew of aliens in yellow jumpsuits crash into the blue planet with the intention of turning your neighborhood straight out of Wisteria Lane into a veritable drug cartel. And the drug is you humans. Kenny, a damn talkative gun teleports you in a moment of panic to the alien lands of Blim City and charges you with the tough task of getting rid of the scourge from elsewhere. He will soon be joined by a knife that also has a long tongue and murder in the blood. Here is the pitch of High on Life, a new invention straight out of the crazy mind of the creator of Rick & Morty, Justin Roiland.
Newly available exclusively on PC and Xbox, the game signs not without surprise the best launch of the year on the Game Pass catalog, but also the third best launch in the entire history of the service in addition to making the best start there for a single player game.A surprise, because the software only inherits the rather light average of 68 on the aggregator Metacritic. A score that can be explained by below-average shooting sensations, a fairly meager bestiary, perfectible game design, really painful objective markers and so many other flaws that make it an FPS that is not very brilliant on the form . High On Life is also content with very classic mechanics; the structure and the living weapons are reminiscent of Oddworld: The Fury of the Stranger and the player can count on a handful of familiar skills cited on the fly by Carnbee in a previous paper: the ironsight, the dash, the grappling hook, secondary fire, scanner indicating the path to the objective, explosive barrels and bonuses dropped by opponents. But Roiland’s acting shines with the public for other more obvious qualities: an absurd, irreverent and full of second degree universe. Assets still very rare in the ocean of shooting productions.
A breath of fresh air in the Game Pass
When you think “comic FPS”, it’s probably the Borderlands saga that comes to mind first; the schoolboy humor of the Gearbox license easily found a conquered audience without having to worry about any significant competition. Each year, it is rather the more serious war shooters that are part of the trends: Call of Duty and its Battle Royale in the lead, but also Halo and all their smaller counterparts. High On Life therefore invites itself into a field that is still little coveted in absolute terms, accompanied by a universe with a familiar theme, for its part well anchored in popular culture: The success of the Rick & Morty series is not more to prove, the license having established itself as a tenor of animated comedy since the beginning of the 2010s now. Its DNA was naturally injected into the other video game productions of Justin Roiland’s studio, Squanch Game. Trover Saves the Universe in particular, took players on a more burlesque mission: “Your dogs have been kidnapped by a beaked madman named Glorkon who has poked them through his eyeholes and is using their life essence to destroy the universe. (game synopsis)”
Trover Saves the Universe
As a bonus, the players find in the gun Kenny the voice of Rick and Morty, which is none other than that of Roiland himself. An unfailing pleasure although it may be unfortunate that the game is not dubbed in French. Because High on Life is very talkative, so talkative that you can even reduce the frequency of dialogues debited from the menu. Despite this, some jokes may escape you in the heat of the moment. No need to specify that you have to adhere body and soul to the half-Rick & Morty, half-South Park humor of the experience in order to be able to appreciate it a little bit. High on Life is undeniably a game that does not take itself seriously and even openly makes fun of its flaws, an asset that has earned it the best-selling software at the moment (at 49.99 euros), dethroning the behemoths that are Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 or FIFA 23. Before him, it was Scorn who had divided critics and audiences for similar reasons: anecdotal fights, swept away by a purely singular artistic direction and a deliberately repulsive aesthetic. With its ultra-shimmering panoramas, denoting pitch and excessively light tone, High on Life was perhaps what the FPS needed at the moment.
