High on Life 2

1. Summary

Most reviewers recommend High on Life 2, and much of the criticism is about how it runs rather than the game itself. The skateboard gets the warmest reception: it replaces sprinting, turns every hub into a skate park and speeds up fights, and praise for it far outweighs complaints. Players also enjoy the new talking guns, boss fights that try new things (one senator hides inside your settings menu and makes you factory reset into a retro Bible game) and a busy world full of extras, from full B-movies with commentary to escape rooms and skate races. Players are split on whether it is funnier than the first game. Some find the writing sharper, others say the comedy lost its edge, and some miss Kenny, the first game's lead gun.

Technical trouble runs through the whole corpus. 56% of all reviews mention crashes, poor performance, bugs or shader compiling, including 80% of the negative reviews and 47% of the positive ones. Players describe fatal-error crashes even on top-end PCs, stutter and frame drops, shaders rebuilding on every launch, and soft locks in scripted scenes that the single autosave can make permanent. Reviewers say patches fixed a lot after launch week, and crash reports fell sharply, but people were still reporting crashes and stutter months later. Price is the other recurring complaint: some recommend it only on sale, calling a 10 to 20 hour campaign steep at full price.

2. What keeps coming up

What players praise

The skateboard changes everythingHigh

The skateboard comes up in 15% of reviews, and clear praise for it outnumbers clear complaints about five to one. It replaces sprinting, grinds on almost any edge, wall-rides, rams and stuns enemies, and every map is built around it. Players compare it to Tony Hawk, Jet Set Radio and Sunset Overdrive. "Whoever thought of the skateboard idea. Give them the biggest raise ever." Another put it as "I feel like im playing Tony Hawk while blasting aliens with funny guns." The skate races and letter hunts get fond mentions too, and one player says they keep coming back after finishing the game just to skate.

Complaints about the board are specific. Some say it auto-grinds onto rails they did not want, can't turn back, and pulls them out of cover in fights. A smaller group wanted a normal sprint as well: "i hate everything about it. just let me sprint." A few felt the faster movement makes you zoom past the NPC jokes the first game made you walk into.

Talking guns and the new GatliansMedium

Sheath (a mercenary rifle), Travis and Jan (a bickering married pair of pistols), Bowie the bow and Jeppy all have fans, and players like that every gun comments on scenes when it is equipped. Travis and Jan's marriage drama and Sheath's introduction are singled out as highlights. Knifey and Creature still have devoted followers. The gripe that does come up is balance: a few found the old guns outclassed by the new ones and stopped using them outside puzzles.

Inventive bosses and set piecesMedium

Players praise the boss fights as more varied than the first game's. One they single out is the senator who shrinks into your settings menu and forces a "factory reset" into a retro Bible game. One player summed it up as "Fighting an evil senator who shrinks himself down and hides inside your game menu". The murder mystery on the yacht, the convention level, the PS1-style wizard world, the prison break without arms and the courtroom all get named. A few found some genre shifts jarring, usually naming a block-building section or the farm cult mission.

A big, colorful world to exploreMedium

Reviewers like the art direction, the three large hubs and the level design, and many enjoy hunting chests and secrets with the board. One called it "a very unique world design that you'll want to explore endlessly". The new map and the Luglox exterminator who tracks missed chests are welcome additions. Some think the move to more realistic lighting made it look darker or more washed out than the first game, and one found the main city of Arcadia "oddly empty and unlived-in."

Side content and extrasMedium

Outside missions there are full B-movies in the theater (one with Red Letter Media commentary), playable retro games in the arcade, escape rooms, fishing, a comedy club, dating, taxi jobs, wanted posters and skate challenges. "hell there are 6 full movies in the game, with one being ripped apart by the Red Letter Media guys." Completionists enjoy it, though several note that some of these activities are where the soft locks happen (see frustrations).

The soundtrackLow

A smaller group praises the score, which reviewers credit to TOBACCO, calling it psychedelic and funky; "the soundtrack is unnecessarily good for a poop joke game." A few found individual tracks grating and turned the music down.

Where players are split

Is it funnier than the first game?High

29% of reviews compare it with the first High on Life, and about as many call the humor better as call it worse. One camp finds the comedy sharper and better structured, with running jokes that pay off and fewer gags that drag: "The jokes are better, the combat is better, and the addition of the Skateboard adds so much". The other says it is tamer, more scripted and less surprising, with fewer bizarre NPC encounters: "it just isn't as funny as the original in my personal opinion." Some players who recommend it call it a step down in comedy and a step up in gameplay.

Kenny, the first game's main gun, is absent, and players notice. About half of those who bring him up simply say they miss him ("I do still miss Kenny though"), some wanted the character recast rather than written out, and a few found Sweezy a poor replacement as the starting gun. Others say the new cast filled the gap: "so much so that I forgot about Kenny within the first few hours of playing." A small group also found the anti-corporate satire heavy-handed, while others enjoyed the pharma and politics jokes.

Combat and gunplayMedium

Opinions on the shooting differ. Some say it is tighter and faster than the first game, mainly thanks to skating, the new long-range guns and a new gravity-gun ability: "The gunplay is more tight than the first game". Others found it weightless, with infinite ammo and cooldowns making one or two guns enough: "even with all upgrades the weapons feel like they have the impact of a water gun in the worst way." A few found even the hardest mode easy and the bosses soft.

A strong opening and a weaker back halfMedium

Some players who finished describe the first two bounties (the yacht and the convention) as the high point and the later missions as thinner. One review, titled "Amazing First Half, Rushed Second Half", put it as "The game just couldn't keep the quality of the first 2 chapters." The finale divides people: some loved the courtroom and the final boss, others called the closing skate sequence a long, easy run where "Its a near infinitely stretching straight line".

PuzzlesLow

Some enjoy the puzzles built around each gun's special ability and like that the game "doesn't scream at you about how to solve every puzzle before you're even done looking around". Others find them tedious breaks in the action, especially the early electrical-junction puzzles and the lugblob doors. Puzzles are also a common place for bugs, so players can't always tell a wrong answer from a broken trigger: "it's really annoying to discover a puzzle and waste a bunch of time just to find out through a walkthrough that everything you did was correct".

What frustrates players

Stutter, frame drops and shader compilingHigh

Performance comes up in 29% of reviews. Players report traversal stutter, sudden drops (one player went from 100 FPS to 30 on the beach, and others name the main city), heavy reliance on upscaling and frame generation, and recommended specs some consider too high for the art style. Reviewers with RTX 4080, 4090 and 5090 cards report problems as well as those on older hardware, while some report smooth play. Shaders rebuilding at every launch is a specific irritant: "My favorite part about this game so far is downloading 30,000 shaders every time I reboot it after it crashes." Workarounds circulate in the reviews (driver updates or rollbacks, turning off overlays, lowering global illumination, Nvidia Reflex), and reviewers say patches in late February and March brought big gains for some. Others were still writing in late July that "This game has been out for too long to still have performance this awful."

Bugs, soft locks and one autosaveHigh

Enemies or bosses fall through the map, objectives don't trigger, NPCs freeze mid-dialogue, guns vanish, and some minigames won't let you leave. 29% of reviews mention bugs or glitches, and 6% describe a soft lock, hard lock or being unable to progress. The same trouble spots recur: the yacht slide after the murder mystery, the painting portals, Murder Con, the escape rooms and especially the courtroom near the end ("DO NOT FIRE YOUR WEAPON OR WEAPONS DURING COURT!"). With one autosave and no manual save, a bad checkpoint can force a full restart: "The game auto-saved me into an unwinnable state." One player summed up the experience as "The bugs and the jokes have almost merged, that's how bad it is." Reviewers say patches fixed several of these, and some flipped to positive after the developers responded to their save files.

Crashes and fatal errorsHigh

Crashes come up in 26% of reviews. Players describe Unreal Engine fatal errors every 15 to 60 minutes, crashes when releasing Jeppy, on alt-tab, after pausing or on loading new areas, and occasional full system freezes. One review reads "I've really enjoyed what I've been able to play so far, but the game has crashed 8 times in 30 minutes." Frequent autosaves soften it for some players, and crash reports fell steeply after the first patches, but they never disappeared.

Price against lengthMedium

Dozens of reviews, positive and negative, say to wait for a sale. Players put the campaign at 10 to 20 hours and find full price steep, especially for a game that launched in rough shape: "Fun game, just not worth $60." A few push back that it is longer than the first game and packed with side content, but even some fans tell others to "buy it on sale".

No way back into missionsLow

Players who go for 100% complain that story locations can't be revisited, that some collectibles and achievements are missable with no warning, and that the world empties out after the ending with no enemies left to fight. "I REALLY hate how you cant go back to the previous mission locations". Requests include mission replay, an arena or wave mode, and New Game Plus.

Screen flicker and visual glitchesLow

A smaller group reports severe screen tearing and flicker when using Sheath or the scanner, plus textures that never finish loading. A few warn about it as a seizure risk: "I'd advise epileptics to tread carefully when playing this as these errors can happen any time."

Dialogue that overlaps or can't be skippedLow

Some players say characters talk over and cut each other off, so jokes get lost, and that long scenes lock your movement with no way to skip lines you have heard: "a huge amount of time is dedicated to just standing frozen hearing what the NPC is trying to convey."

Controls and keybindsLow

A handful report rebinding bugs on mouse and keyboard, weapon number keys not working, hardcoded binds, and controllers dropping inputs in some menus and minigames.

3. The player conversation

Players are warm about the game and angry about its condition. Half of all reviews (1,084) were posted in the first ten days, starting February 13, and in that window 65% mentioned technical problems and 35% mentioned crashes. Many of those reviews are conditional, praising the game while telling others to wait for patches. By late February and March, technical mentions fell to about half of reviews and crash mentions to 21%, and some reviewers wrote that the hotfixes had cleared their problems, a few updating their reviews to recommend it. From April onward technical mentions settled around 45%, with crash mentions down to 12% from July, so the problems never faded the way those patch-era edits suggested they might. The recommendation share rose from 68% in launch week to the 70s through March, then sat at 66% across reviews written from July on.

What negative reviews raise depends on how far the player got. Among negative reviews from players with under two hours, 52% talk about performance and 37% about crashes, and almost none mention soft locks. Negative reviews from players with ten or more hours read differently: 21% describe soft locks, 25% raise price or value, 16% discuss the ending or the courtroom sequence, and complaints about weaker humor show up more often. The earliest complaints are mostly about whether the game runs; the later ones more often take issue with the ending, the length and the comedy.

Almost a third of reviews compare the game with the first one, so fans of the original drive much of the discussion. A side argument pits players who blame weak PCs against those reporting crashes on high-end hardware. A few players on AMD cards or Linux report it running well, and one wonders whether Nvidia users are the ones having trouble.

4. What the developers could do

1. Stop the crashes first. Crashes appear in 26% of reviews, from fatal errors every half hour to crashes when releasing Jeppy, alt-tabbing or loading a new area, and together with poor performance they are the main subject of negative reviews written in under two hours of play.
2. Make soft locks recoverable with manual saves or several rolling checkpoints. Players lost whole runs when the single autosave captured a broken state at the courtroom, the yacht slide, the painting portals or Murder Con, and some asked directly for manual saves or an unstuck option.
3. Fix the remaining scripted-sequence and puzzle bugs. Reviewers describe objectives that won't trigger, NPCs that freeze mid-dialogue and puzzles that only work after a reload, which leaves them unsure whether they solved anything.
4. Cut stutter and cache shaders between launches. Players describe traversal stutter, sudden frame drops and a shader rebuild on every launch, including players on high-end cards.
5. Fix the Sheath and scanner screen flicker. Several players report full-screen tearing and flicker tied to these tools, and some flag it as a seizure risk.
6. Let players revisit mission locations and flag missables. Completionists asked for mission replay, warnings on missable collectibles and achievements, and something to do after the ending, such as an arena or wave mode.
7. Let players skip heard dialogue and stop lines talking over each other. Players say jokes get cut off by overlapping lines and long scenes freeze them in place with no skip.
8. Reconsider the price against the campaign length. Advice to wait for a sale appears in positive and negative reviews alike, with players weighing a 10 to 20 hour campaign and a rough launch against the full price.