420 Blaze It 2 may be a joke, but there's a solid shooter buried beneath the memes

GamesFPS420 Blaze It 2 may be a joke, but there’s a solid shooter buried beneath the memesWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Normal Wholesome Games)

Holding a gun sideways to shoot bad guys with Illuminati symbols for heads in a rainbow-colored room

While I was waiting to try the demo of 420 Blaze It 2 at PAX Australia, a guy passing mentioned he’d played the originalGame of the Year: 420 Blaze Iton his school laptop, a sentence designed to make people feel old. “You should absolutely not have been playing it on a school laptop,” one of the devs told him, and he was right.

420 Blaze It was a parody of shooter killcam montages that enjoyed a viral moment in 2014. A free game designed for the 7 Day FPS Jam, it overlaid every hit with more text than a Korean reality show, shouting RESPECKS and DID U SEE IT, presenting gifs of Sanic and that one dancing cartoon dog, and blasting dubstep. A decade later it’s back with an upcoming sequel that has its ownSteam pageand a demo you can download and try for yourself.

Gameplay Reveal Trailer Game of the Year 420 Blaze It 2 - YouTubeWatch On

Gameplay Reveal Trailer Game of the Year 420 Blaze It 2 - YouTube

Early on I pressed R to reload my gun and expected a joke. Instead, I got a slick and professional Call of Duty-ass reload animation, because some jokes are funnier when they’re painted over a layer of seriousness. Fighting my way through the rooms of 420 Blaze It 2 I switched from the machine gun to the shotgun as I closed distance, threw grenades at enemies in clumps, and timed my reloads to coincide with the moments I was temporarily behind one of the big rocks in Sherk’s swamp. Even with my gun held sideways and the words “2012-rekt” and “losers say wat” accompanying every headshot, 420 Blaze It 2 is an upsettingly competent first-person shooter.

It’s just one that doesn’t expect you to take it seriously, that doesn’t come drenched in tacticool modern warfare nonsense, and that knows it exists because our lizard brains have been subject to digital brain rot for so long that a well-timed “420 noscope” in purple Comic Sans is what it takes to bring us joy.

Put us in the bin already. It’s garbage day, after all. 420 Blaze It 2 will be out onSteamin November.

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