On his RTGame channel in 2021, YouTuber and streamer Daniel Condren made headlines by dragging countless NPCs from a Hitman level into a walk-in freezer, in an attempt to simultaneously kill every single NPC in one map. He didn’t quite succeed. Now, he’s made another go at it, using the gigantic grape press in the winery that is Hitman 3’s final map. And this time, it went better.

You can watch it take place in a 40-minute edit of the stream. Well, actually the edit seems to be of two streams – in the first, he drags the NPCs one-by-one to smash them after knocking each one out with a baseball bat. That takes over 15 hours, according to the timer at the top of the stream. Then, the video cuts to what looks to be another stream, started at 5 hours and 49 minutes in, after he had dragged each body to the area just in front of the press, ready to be crushed by Condren’s cruel hitman.

There’s an old refrain among comedians that no joke survives its retelling, and you don’t need to look any further than the shoddy track record of comedy movie sequels to see the truth in that. Fortunately, funny video games tend to fare much better, from Borderlands 2 to Portal 2, and so you would hope that a weird, deeply inappropriate game about drugs and talking guns like High On Life 2 might enjoy the same kind of evolution. In some ways it does just that, with many of its existing bright spots shining even more brightly – the lovable weapons that serve as your companions are more amusing than ever, and movement outside of combat is greatly improved by radical new skateboarding mechanics. But other areas don’t hold up as well, like the significantly less polished story, jokes that don’t land quite as often, and performance issues that are even more shaky than the first game. I still enjoyed my time with High On Life 2, and truly relish the opportunity to return to a world this goofy any chance I get, but this is definitely closer to Zoolander 2 than 22 Jump Street.

High On Life 2 picks up right where our foul-mouthed cast of characters left off… sort of. After a dizzyingly fast intro recaps the events of the first game and gets you back into the action, you find yourself on the wrong side of the law and ready to begin the familiar process of hunting down a list of baddies to bring down an evil organization. Instead of a drug cartel, this time the villain comes in the form of a pharmaceutical company that I felt no guilt killing off members of over the course of the roughly 10-hour campaign, now playing the role of rogue assassin as I ply my trade of death illegally – a nice twist to the otherwise nearly identical setup of the original.

Sadly, the story built around this string of over-the-top murder missions is a bit sloppy, with a couple big reveals that don’t really land and a surprising number of monologues to explain motives and technologies. There’s a shocking amount of “tell, don’t show” for a game that is typically very intentionally about not sweating the details and following the rule of cool. It sorta reminds me of a D&D campaign that’s gone on way too long and starts to feel like the DM is twisting himself in knots trying to get to that cool payoff, missing the mark too often in the process. The good news is that the plot at least moves along at a pretty fast clip with a steady stream of silly gags to keep you guessing, even when the story gets messy.

Speaking of silly gags, like its predecessor, this is an adventure that relies a whole lot on the success of its goofiness and whimsy, and there are plenty of laugh out loud moments to be had. The high points are extremely memorable, like when you fight an incredibly annoying boss who transports himself inside your menus and starts messing with your game settings (appropriately voiced by the legendary Richard Kind), or when one mission concludes with a murder mystery that has you gathering clues and interrogating witnesses instead of shooting guns. Sometimes the lowbrow humor also just hits, like a side quest where someone wanted me to help them find a bridge troll and…y’know, I think I’ll just leave it at that. High On Life 2 is at its best when it’s trying weird and creative things, and when it manages to pull that off, there’s really nothing quite like it.

That talking Aussie blade cuts both ways though, as jokes fall flat a tad too often in this sequel, and it’s pretty tough to watch when they do. Granted, it’s always harder to pull off gags in a world that has had a lot of its juice squeezed out already – we know about the species of sentient guns, for example, and have already had most of the funny moments we’re going to get out of that surreal experience – but some of the jokes are quite literal repeats of things that happened in the first game. If I was having the most fun when High On Life 2 was trying new stuff, I was having the least when it was retreading old bits or just throwing a couple curse words onto the end of a sentence in lieu of actual punchlines.

The stars of the show in the original were the gun companions you met and befriended along the way, and that certainly remains true in this follow-up. Meeting a down on his luck pistol named Travis (who has a charmingly dorky voice from Ken Marino) and reuniting him with his estranged wife is both a satisfying arc and a clever way to introduce the first dual-wielded weapon when his spouse joins the party (I do wish they’d make out less though). All four of the new gun companions are awesome and have helpful abilities in both combat and puzzle-solving, like Sheath, whose harpoon “trick hole” attack can impale people during fights and create ziplines while platforming. Plus, most of the OG Gatlians make a return as well, including my favorite partner in crime (literally this time), Gus, the shotgun who looks like a frog and has the unmistakable voice of J.B. Smoove. Hell yeah.

Unfortunately, a wider variety of guns hasn’t done much to make the sloppy and overly simplistic gunplay any better – in fact it even feels a touch worse. Some of the new weapons are quite crisp compared to the wonky slugthrowers of yore, especially Sheath’s burst-fire that reminds me of the battle rifle from Halo. But with so many enemies and projectiles flying around, claustrophobic rooms with odd geometry that enemies get caught behind and within, and weapon accuracy being a bit all over the place, combat leans into chaos more than anything else. Most of the time that’s fine because you’re playing a game that’s all about over-the-top nonsense, but when you occasionally die due to unfair circumstances or when a fight drags on for a bit too long, it can kill the mood. To its credit, the enemy variety is mostly decent, with a stream of ugly new creatures to blast apart introduced at a steady clip, from flying robotic freaks to spooky, scary skeletons – but if you were looking for a polished FPS with gunfights that feel at all coherent, look elsewhere.

The biggest and most interesting change with High On Life 2 is mobility, as you’re given a trusty skateboard in the opening minutes that serves as your travel companion throughout the adventure. Instead of fighting on foot, most encounters highly encourage or outright require you to be grinding on rails, riding on the sides of walls, and soaring through the air on your skateboard. When it comes to traveling from place-to-place or navigating your way through platforming sections, this is pretty awesome, and a shocking amount of your time will be spent rolling around like you’re playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. I didn’t really expect the skateboard to play such a big role, but honestly I can’t imagine going back to the relative sluggishness of running around on foot.

In combat, the skateboard’s influence isn’t so positive. You’re seemingly expected to never stop moving while fighting hordes of aliens, which makes the already chaotic encounters even more noisy and hard to read. Many fights take place in open areas where you’re surrounded by more bad guys than you could possibly keep track of, and staying put is a death sentence with so little cover, so you’ll have to take shots at passersby while leaping from various parts of the environment to keep yourself going as fast as you can. Combine that juggling act with slippery weapons, enemies that teleport around, and weird foes that are often hard to even understand what you’re looking at, and oh boy, the result is just an absolute diarrhea of pixels.

Those pixels seem to be pushing High On Life 2 to its limits as well, because I saw frequent framerate dips (some that caused my screen to freeze for several seconds before getting it together) and progress-hindering bugs that required me to reload the last checkpoint. Developer Squanch Games did include “various performance issues across the game” on a list of known problems with the review build that will apparently be addressed by a patch, but it didn’t specify the extent to which those would be resolved – and in my experience, a day-one patch rarely makes all of a game’s performance problems magically disappear when they are this extensive. Nothing I saw struck me as game breaking beyond a simple reset, but it was consistent and egregious enough to make me worried for the stuff people will find when this is out in the wild.

There are quite a few modern first-person shooters taking notes from the bullet hell arcade games from yesteryear. Games like BPM or Deadzone Rogue throw walls of projectiles and fodder enemies at you, and demand you thread yourself through them like a gun-toting needle to return fire without getting obliterated. Luna Abyss joins these ranks but certainly stirs the formula up a bit. When we took a look at the first level of gloomy sci-fi shooter a couple of years ago, we saw just enough to get intrigued by the potential quivering in the crimson glow between all of its shadows. Now that we’ve gotten our hands on a bit more, being introduced to a new weapon, movement mechanics, and a killer boss fight, I can safely say that the optimism was justified.

Warm-Up Round

I was dropped right back into Sorrow’s Canyon, a prison colony with the most accurate name in the universe. The grimy metal halls, scaffoldings, and makeshift walkways made out of piping mixed with occasional stone floors and weird organic growths all give a sort of Chronicles of Riddick, grim dark gothic energy. Giger-esque, without all of the phallic stuff. It certainly doesn’t matter what anyone was actually doing in a place like this before our hero, Fawkes, wakes up in an open coffin, finds a nifty gun, and starts shooting them all, because most of the things that move around down here that aren’t you are mindless husks who want to destroy you.

The almost sardonically chummy tone in which the sudden guiding voice in Fawkes’ ear, Aylin, takes with her charge does help add a bit of texture to what comes off as a pretty standard “everything here sucks and is bad” aesthetic. Most people, likely including her, would rather not be trapped here, but she is dangerously close to sounding like she’s having something that resembles fun, and that does make me want to know what this world is hiding, at the very least. It sits in contrast with the only other non-enemy character you meet in the demo, The Waif, who gives guidance in solemn riddles like a depressed Tom Bombadil.

Gliding from room to room, strafing gracefully through enemy fire and returning with blasts of your own is a breezy process, thanks to the aim function that auto locks to the enemy closest to your crosshairs, letting you focus more on the moving than the aiming. I liked this at first, taking the mental load off of trying to line up shots while gliding from cover to cover helps you focus on defense. But as the encounters progressed, the challenge didn’t really follow suit. Skull-faced drones chased me around the room while floating eyeballs fired from floating perches, but things didn’t get anywhere near too hairy to deal with in the canyon.

The Water Begins to Simmer

I found a second weapon, a shotgun that specialized in shutting down gleaming blue shields, and some nuance and complexity started to reveal itself. Some enemies now were cloaked in these barriers, which had to be shattered by the shotgun before doing damage to them directly. Now I was sliding from cover to cover, switching back and forth between weapons to make certain enemies vulnerable while trying not to overstay my welcome in any one spot for too long. That auto lock feature began to make more sense, but still, I found getting to the end of the Canyon to be a pretty tame experience. I know this was the extent of the original demo, and I can see walking away from this feeling tepid about what the future could hold for this goth-person shooter.

Then I played the new additional mission from further into the game and yeah, Luna Abyss might be cooking with gas.

Full Boil

The Scourge Crater is a snowy, craggy mountain face with floating platforms and a heaping helping of sunlight and sky. There are a lot of floating bits of rock and far away platforms that put Fawkes’ new double jump and air dash to great use. Theres no real indication to what has happened to Fawkes between the Canyon and now to give them these powers, likw the ability to execute low health enemies to regain health, but I don’t necessarily require exposition every time theres an opportunity to do something badass.

It doesn’t take long to find a new weapon, a long ranged rifle that does big damage, but overheats in just a handful of shots (unlike your standard gun or shotgun that you can squeak many more rounds out of before havin g to cool it down). New enemies come with it, like some floating bundles of death that explode when touched, or a larger, scarier eyeball creature with its one big single-shot laser. This new weapon comes with a new color of shield to dispatch, too.

When we get off to the races, moving from little island to little island, staying fast on the trigger for the new enemies that pop up at a brisk pace, and staying on top of what the necessary weapon to take them down with was the faster-paced slobberknocker I was looking for. It’s not quite Doom-levels of expressive combat – every enemy there has a best weapon to kill them with but not necessarily a “correct” weapon, leaving room to flex however you see fit. But the limited offensive options are balanced with the sometimes overwhelming need for defensive finesse. At its best, every plan has a window of time where it will be most effective before you have to regroup and try something else, like dipping behind a pillar of rock to wait out a big beam, knowing that a handful of bomb drones are well on their way to clear you out of cover with a bang.

Traveling through this stage between combat introduced some environmental movement tricks as well, like boost gates that launch you when you dash through them, or weird flovating balloons that you can possess, jumping inside them to get a view from their perspective before erupting out of them to continue the climb. There’s a cool, if not a little garish, moment a little over midway through the wintry crater where you can actually possess a Goliath, some sort of giant minigun wielding monstrosity that can mow down a small battalion of enemies with ease. Though this level kept things pretty simple, I like the potential of Luna Abyss using possession in conjunction with air dashing and double jumps for some good platforming puzzles – or even in combat scenarios.

Eye of the Beholder

The rowdiest and most difficult combat in the entire demo was against the level-ending boss, a big eyeball monster in the style of a Dungeons and Dragons Beholder by way of Dark City. It stayed in the center, relentlessly firing walls of bullets (and occasionally lasers) making it tough to find the space to take advantage of how exposed it was. Phases where it is invulnerable and you need to deal with how to fix that change the pace up well, at first its juvst breaking the connection between power points in the walls that are blasting it with an impenetrable shield, but eventually it’s surviving waves of enemies and long stanzas of incoming fire, etc. At its busiest, it almost felt a bit like Housemarque’s excellent Returnal, but in a smaller arena. I can only hope Luna Abyss’s combat can crescendo like this for all of its boss fights.

With some patience for its soft-touch opening minutes, I found myself very on board with the Luna Abyss’s brand of crowded screen shoot-em up. It’s thick with moody vibes, which can be more than just a good backdrop for the action. And don’t let that auto targeting aim get you complacent, because when the more blustery bad guys turn up the heat, you won’t have aiming as an excuse as to why surviving the onslaught takes you multiple respawns. If the gunplay and platforming can evolve further, as it did between these two demo levels, then I can’t wait to stare into the Abyss when it opens wide sometime this year.