Additional Play - I tried out High On Life for about an hour or so. It's interesting that the game polarises opinion, because for me it's a solid 7/10. It gave me nostalgia for the raft of 7/10 shooters on the Xbox 360. The game it reminded me most of was The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, a game I had forgotten about the second I finished it. I have no idea why I bothered to finish it. Relentlessly average, utterly forgettable, with a gimmick that must have kept me playing, even though the gimmick itself is a bit "meh." However there is something nice about a solid 7/10 shooter. You follow the corridors and do the gameplay and the story happens and then you get on with your life. They're just unstressful. I quite liked going down HOL's colourful corridors and shooting the generic enemies, and exploring the little game hub. There are some powers - a hook thing that you use to swing from one place to another, and I just got a warp thing. Some of the enemies seem to parody Halo enemy behaviour.
Obviously, the thing people are bouncing off is the humour. Cav pointed out the phenomenon of people claiming to have never heard of Rick and Morty or saying they've watched two minutes of the show and could tell instantly that it was beneath them. I'm not one of those guys. I've watched all of the first four series' and I really like it. It's funny, and sometimes unexpectedly deep. The moment in the first series when R&M have to bury their own mangled corpses from an alternative dimension and assume their identities while Mazzy Star's Look On Down From The Bridge plays is pretty powerful. However, High On Life is not prime Rick and Morty. I'm not going into Justin Roiland's recent domestic violence charges. He's not been convicted yet, so I'll wait before branding him a piece of shit just yet. However, HOL makes me think that perhaps Roiland is better with his full writing team. Dan Harmon isn't involved. I haven't seen any of the post-Harmon R&M episodes yet, so I can't compare HOL to them. HOL does contain some of the flavour of R&M, particularly in the voice acting and style of dialogue. The talking guns. The people claiming they don't ever shut up aren't quite right, but they do go on a bit.
"Oh God you just shot that guy oh wow is this what we're- oh I guess we are I guess we're doing this okay I guess this is what we're doing this is what's happening oh you shot them all even that guy oh man oh wow"
It's not funny in and of itself. It's the kind of thing that might sound funny in a pitch - "Hey, what if we put talking guns in this and they - get this - they never shut up!" Big laugh in the room. A funny idea, but if that was actually in the game it wouldn't be much fun to play unless the dialogue was genuinely funny. Most of the time, it's not funny. Sometimes it is. You can see the kernal of that writing room idea and the sheer audacity is kind of amusing. Like, later there's this character that pops up - a flying yellow guy who floats around in front of you and talks and talks and talks. I think it's a parody of Navi or Tingle or the thing from Destiny. Only this guy complains about his mother and his exes then starts getting creepy about the protagonist. Quite a funny idea. In practice it makes that 15-minute or so section really irritating. You can't shoot him.
However I did laugh out loud a few times, and not many games do that. HOL might be suffering in comparison to Psychonauts 2 which I'm also playing at the moment and is funnier, but when I shot an enemy and as they fell they said, "With my dying breath… I renounce… Jesus" I laughed. We've all seen the bit where the game basically forces you to shoot a child. That's not particularly funny in itself, but the fact that the game gives you an achievement for the murder called "Fallout doesn't let you do that" is pretty good. Then seconds later you meet the kid's mother and she doesn't seem particularly bothered and tells you it's fine. That made me laugh. It's a sly dig at the way some games will have you do something terrible and then absolve you for some convenient reason.
Rick and Morty is at it's best when it's humour is clever and when a bit of heart undercuts the nihilism. High On Life's humour a lot of the time is just cruel. I'm no edgelord, but I don't mind when humour has a bit of darkness to it. These days "edgy" humour tends to mean invoking Hitler, mocking people who don't deserve it, or just being an awful human being, but the best black humour is actually very right-on. I'm thinking of the likes of Get Out or Dr Strangelove. There should be a point. It shouldn't just be, "look at this pathetic guy. He's not even got any legs. How disgusting." The general silliness of the game is welcome, the mean-spiritedness is not. I mentioned that this is just Roiland, and perhaps he's missing the rest of his writing team, but this feels like we're getting only half the Rick and Morty experience. The ideas and understanding of the larger universe are missing, and in their place are nastiness, a belief that mentions of drug use and constant swearing are edgy, and frequent attempts to troll the player.
Despite these criticisms, I can see myself continuing to play it. I like the gameplay, and I wonder if the reason I am seeing the humour as a bit too mean is because I haven't got to the part where it becomes a bit more human. It's not a bad game. It's colourful and creative, and it certainly has character, unlike a lot of modern games.
TLDR - It's a 7/10 shooter with hit and miss humour. If you're the type to skip all my hard work writing all that and go straight to the tldr, that's all you deserve. 
