We tried the fun first person shooter from the creator of High on Life: Rick and Morty

The original surprise of the Xbox & Bethesda conference at the beginning of summer, High on Life immediately managed to grab the attention of a double audience: on the one hand, all the fans of this incredibly funny animated production that lives up to its name. Rick and MortyOn the other hand, besides the productions of great importance, the audience of players who enjoy certain products on a low budget and perhaps just aim to entertain them without going overboard.

If for some reason you don’t know anything about this title and don’t want to check out the trailer below, we’re using these few lines to better explain what it is. It is a first-person shooter made by High on Life. Squanch Gamesis a small independent studio founded by Justin Roiland, one of Rick and Morty’s co-creators and historical voice actor. The aforementioned trailer takes just a few seconds to find the touchpoints between the two productions: the rhythm, the foul-mouthed and politically incorrect jokes, a certain insane sci-fi look, totally at the top of each one. moment. This is all in an indie production, a Trio I as its creator enjoys repeating. In short, we’re not dealing with an opponent from Call of Duty or Battlefield, but rather doing everything not to take himself seriously and appearing to have the conditions to tell an utterly hilarious story. We’re dealing with a sniper.

At the Xbox booth that hosted the developer at Gamescom 2022, Try the full High on Life demo Extraction of the last fight shown during Opening Light Live. Positioned about twenty minutes after the start of the narrative and following the tutorial, a good part of the game is that it’s kind of clear mission 2, which is useful for getting familiar with the controls and gameplay. Before telling you what we’ve discovered and our impressions, we recommend you take a look at the game’s rich special released a few weeks ago, where you can find out more about the story and setting.

A simple and simple shooter

The first element of gameplay to emerge from our testing has to do with the extreme reduction of bone. shooting dynamics by High on Life. You move, jump and shoot in the game. At least the ones we tried in its early stages. There doesn’t seem to be any more complex movement dynamics like sliding, running on walls, or weird dodges, and there also doesn’t seem to be any element of role progression if we exclude some sort of enhancement of weapons and resistance of weapons. the protagonist we saw just before the mission. During this “preparation” phase, it was actually possible to walk around a house, chat with our sister and the absurd alien owner and the owner of a portal where it is possible to switch from scenario to scenario, and also access the full equipment development screens. was not active in the demo.

After accepting the job, we found ourselves wandering the streets of an extremely colorful alien metropolis and then infiltrating its sewers in search of an enemy to defeat. This way we can gradually become familiar with it. first two guns Summary of the game: A weapon voiced by one of the creators of Rick and Morty and a dagger with a pronounced murderous fury. Both offensive vehicles have two firing modes: lama we can actually take a close shot that looks like it can kill any common enemy right away, or use it as a hook to reach very high areas, or we can jump from one platform to the next, attaching ourselves to flying insects. There gun instead, in addition to “classic” shots, it can be used as a mortar, complete with a parabola of the shot and slowing of the movement during the aiming phase. In this way, for example, we can target hidden enemies or defeat groups of enemies. Affected aliens, among other things, are at the mercy of our shots for a few seconds, soaring through the air, making it much easier to get them out.

The continuation of the mission was strictly standard, with a long pilgrimage through the sewers sprinkled with some. platform stages and a handful of story-related dialogue, and it’s all rounded out with the boss fight shown during Geoff Keighley’s event. On the shooting front, if High on Life seems really minimal in terms of both AI and combat variety (and we hope to balance the issues with the demo, if it offered a lot of assisted aiming, among other things), then where the game really enjoyed us is that we found ourselves involved. dialogs and situations.

Constantly listen to the talking gun’s comments on situations or try to explain to us where to go and what to do, stay involved. crazy dialogues The dagger, which invites us to slay everything that stands before us, sometimes caused us embarrassment when we realized that when we killed an opponent we were laughing out loud in the small room with the demo, with constant appreciation and various delights. stations.

In short, we can say that although High on Life is cute, colorful and really inspiring in character design, it did not impress us much with its gameplay or graphics application, which does not offer a significant technical sector and actually contains numerous uncertainties. about the front of the frame rate, accompanied by some inaccuracies in the management of the stages from which it is necessary to start from gripping with a knife. But we cannot hide that we are there. having fun like crazy and “force” us to listen during our saga to truly wonder where the story will go and the other weird characters and absurd weapons the title will tell us about and save the human race.

But these days we’ll have to wait a few more months as the game progresses, and at the end of the year, exactly December 13th for PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X | S at launch directly on Game Pass. The developers have confirmed to us that they are working on the Italian localization, which should, among other things, also have to do with dubbing, and if that turns out to be true, it would be great news considering how essential the dialogues are to enjoy all games. The humor of High on Live.