"A Few Good Hours of Jokes, Meta Silliness, and Gore" - High on Life: High on Knife DLC Review

screenrant.com:

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. is now ’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.

Related: High on Life Review: An Interdimensional Cable FPS

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, but results in something of a cop-out in terms of character, for reasons we’ll get into below.

’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