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High on Life made a big splash last year, turning a colorful singleplayer comedy FPS packed with irreverent scatological sketches into an XBOX Game Pass hit download. Players traversed an open world, tangled with goopy aliens, and plundered self-referential gaming tropes in Squanch Games’ largest project to date, which still left ample space for a follow-up. High on Knife is now High on Life’s first paid DLC, offering up a new planet to explore, a few additional talking weapons and, frankly, more of the same hit-or-miss gags. While it hardly reinvents the original and can be completed in less than afternoon, its reduced scope helps the narrative and atmosphere cohere a little better, and the humor's more hit than miss on this outing.
In line with player predications on the release of its recent trailer, the 2022 allegations against Squanch Games’ former CEO Justin Roiland have prompted his absence in this outing (and, presumably, the studio’s future output), with SNL alum Sarah Sherman stepping in as a new Gatlien named Harper to round out the returning gang. Maybe it’s a stretch to describe her as all that “new,” as she is 100% a stand-in for the originally-Roiland-voiced Kenny, an offscreen swap which is baked into the game’s canon (no pun intended). A single additional Gatlien-like device known as the B.A.L.L. becomes available early on in High on Knife, but results in something of a cop-out in terms of character, for reasons we’ll get into below.
Knife Tricks and Exploding Balls
High on Knife’s story takes place roughly two years after the original game, time which has its hero has spent in pursuit of new bounties with minimal apparent character growth. When Knifey – his foul-mouthed murder-obsessed Australian melee weapon – learns of a package mistakenly returned to sender, a quest is drawn to retrieve it and violently slice it open, as is Knifey's M.O. Over a fairly direct quest line, Knifey earns his top billing in the title with an expanded look at his backstory and a few new gameplay tricks.
That leaves B.A.L.L. for last, a pinball gun powered by three tiny gibberish-spewing creatures who ride it like a mounted cannon. Sadly, while the little guys are indeed credited to a voice actor, they never spout any actual dialogue, just cycled nonsense which is only comprehendible by all the NPCs in the game. It’s a mediocre played-out gag which essentially suppresses High on Life’s reliance on Gatlien-based characterwork, and even quashes several dialogue opportunities if the player fails to swap to another gun in time.
Still, as it stands, the new gun probably stands as the best weapon in the game. B.A.L.L. can shoot large, lightly-homing pinball spheres, with a secondary ability that tosses out pinball bumpers to increase projectile damage and rebound shots into multiple targets. Additionally, if the player times each additional launch, they'll deflect the ball back and forth between gun and enemy like a paddleball until the sphere eventually explodes. The lack of a coherent personality aside, the weapon is very fun to use, and factors into a few simple environmental puzzles as well.
A Better Humor Hit-Rate This Time Around
There are some strong jokes to be found in High on Knife, including the reappearance of the bounty hunter suit’s AI, a kind of MS-Paint-Meets-Clippy character who infiltrates the HUD to remind the player of the original game’s functions and special abilities, a toolkit which they’ve no doubt forgotten since firing it up last year. There’s also a lengthy laugh-out-loud scenario (teased in the trailer) which is one part Cheers parody, one part The Shining, and a few other audacious gross-out mission objectives round out the brief campaign.
On the one hand, fans would have been thrilled to receive a juicy injection of High on Life content with many more hours of plot, Interdimensional Cable gags, planets, and maybe even better combat, but High on Knife’s brevity makes it feel more like a nice snack than a premium entrée. The gummy and imprecise FPS combat returns fully intact from the original game, of course, and enemies still only manifest in ambush zones, where they respawn and hound the player until an unidentifiable carnage quota is met.
A Horror Game? Not So Much
It's curious how the promotion for this DLC touts it as a horror experience, so please note this as a crude exaggeration. It's about as scary as the original, which did wield some strange or creepier content and body horror, even while continuously draining any possible terror with cheerily crass gags or stream-of-conscious profanity. High on Knife has a little more horror baked into it, possibly, but it’s hardly worth putting on the marquee. Instead, player time is mostly spent merrily crouch-dashing and jetpacking across the salt flats and sulfuric pools of sunny Peroxis, whose inhabitants include a lot of very confused alien snails.
Peroxis is nowhere near as dense or eye-catching as Blim City, but its verticality makes good use of the game's traversal powers, and the wide open stretches factor into some simple optional racing side quests. There are some new creatures to blast, but expect to see a lot of old mobs make their return, like those militaristic ants and goop-covered aliens from the first game.
Final Thoughts & Review Score
There are a series of hidden packages to find and slice open, some funny new forums content in the pause menu and, again, that terrific Cheers bit. For fans of the original, High on Knife will hardly disappoint, but granting this short DLC an extended credits gag feels like a bit much. Preceding it is a few good hours of jokes, meta silliness, and gore, prodded along with more excellently odd voice acting, the equivalent of some extra surprise buds discovered at the bottom of the bag. Still, if High on Knife is a taste of more sizable High on Life DLC bounties to come, all the better.
Source: Squanch Games/YouTube
The High on Knife DLC for High on Life releases October 3 on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5. A digital PC code was provided to Screen Rant for the purpose of this review.