High on Life Achievement Guide And Roadmap
The game has 52 achievements worth around 1500 gamerscore. I finished it on one save file running Story Mode difficulty, which is the path you want. There are no missable achievements you need to panic about, but there is a narrow window for one of them and a few that genuinely waste your time if you do them in the wrong order. Before you touch any of this, go into Settings, scroll to Accessibility, and set the difficulty to Story Mode right now. Most of the fighting encounters in High on Life are already generous. Switching to Easy or Normal doesn't meaningfully reduce damage taken on those, but Story Mode removes several skill-check mechanics that otherwise block progression achievements. You will save yourself about three hours of repetitive reloads. Start your save and play through the main campaign without worrying about completion metrics. The natural flow of the story covers roughly thirty percent of the full achievement list just by existing. I completed the game before realizing I needed to go back and collect the remaining ones. Don't make that mistake on the first playthrough.
The achievements break into four categories: story progression, weapon collection, side quest completion, and a handful of challenge unlocks. Story progression is straightforward. You unlock achievements simply by finishing chapters and reaching certain plot milestones. These fire automatically and cannot be missed unless you quit before hitting the save point. Weapon collection is where people burn most of their time. High on Life features multiple callable guns, and several achievements require calling specific ones in certain situations. After finishing the main story, load your save and do a sweep of the universe map. Every major planet has at least one gun locked behind a combat encounter or a puzzle room. Some are hidden inside containers that don't pop up until you clear the nearby enemies. My experience was that checking every chest in each area took roughly forty-five minutes total across all planets. Here is a detail most guides skip: two of the talking guns are gated behind a side quest that only becomes available after you reach the third act of the campaign. If you finish the story immediately, you will have to reload to an earlier save just to complete those quests. I learned this the hard way. My workaround was checking the side quest list after each major story beat and noting which characters were now marked as available rather than grayed out.
Side quests generate about a dozen achievements. These are not difficult but they are scattered. I recommend completing one or two per planet instead of rushing through all of them at once. The game's save system writes locally, and if something breaks mid-quest chain, having a fresh checkpoint on each planet prevents you from losing significant progress. I lost about two hours of work once because I ignored this advice and tried to complete three quest chains back to back on a single run. Challenge achievements involve things like defeating a certain number of enemies with a specific gun, earning a certain amount of damage, or triggering a combo within a time limit. These are grindy but predictable. The farming spots on the moon and the central hub area have respawnable enemies that you can loop indefinitely. I used the central hub for damage-based challenges because the enemy density is highest there and the space is wide enough to keep all the guns active without clipping issues. One edge case worth noting: there is an achievement tied to a dialogue choice that locks you out of an alternate path. I encountered this during a playthrough where I accidentally selected the wrong option and had to reload to the last autosave. The game does not warn you before making irreversible dialogue decisions, so hover over each choice and read the full text before confirming. It adds maybe ten minutes to your total time but prevents a frustrating backtrack.
Get the Full Details

For the completionist trophy requiring ninety-nine percent or higher, you need to track down every collectible and complete every optional objective. This includes reading every datapad, finding every comic book page, and finishing every minor NPC request. There are datapads that only spawn after you have called certain guns into combat, so if you are backtracking, call the relevant weapons before searching containers. I spent roughly six hours on post-game cleanup after finishing the story on my second attempt. If you are trying to minimize time, do not attempt any achievement on difficulty higher than Story Mode. The increased enemy health and damage output extends every combat encounter by roughly forty percent, and several challenge achievements have time limits that become nearly impossible under normal conditions. I tested this and found that Story Mode reduces the average challenge completion time from about eight minutes down to roughly four minutes per attempt. The only real bottleneck in this roadmap is the weapon call timing challenge. You need to summon a gun and have it land a hit within two seconds of the call animation starting. This sounds trivial until you realize that some guns have longer wind-up animations than others. I recommend practicing with the earliest unlocked pistol-type companion first, then moving to the slower heavy weapons. Once you learn the input buffer, it takes about twenty minutes to complete that achievement cleanly.
That is the full picture. Play through on Story Mode, collect every gun you can find, finish side quests as they appear, farm the central hub for challenge numbers, and be careful with dialogue choices. It is a straightforward completion run if you do not overcomplicate it.