Highguard Review: A Hero Shooter With Too Many Ideas, No Identity

While you want a software, you not often attain for a Swiss Military Knife. It’s an choice that solely is sensible when you don’t have any different choices. Have you ever ever tried to truly lower wooden with the shitty and really flimsy noticed blade included in a Swiss Military Knife or another related form of multitool? I’ve. It was a horrible expertise, and I ended up shopping for a noticed to complete the job. It seems shoving many issues into one bundle isn’t an efficient strategy to make one thing good.

Anyway, have y’all performed Highguard? 

Launched on January 26, Highguard is a (deep breath) free-to-play fantasy-sci-fi MOBA-like 3v3 PVP hero shooter with base protection and raid mechanics. It was first unveiled because the finale of the 2025 Recreation Awards and obtained a less-than-stellar response from folks on-line. And since then, the dialog about Highguard has been very unusual and oddly aggressive. Folks taking sides. Takes being shot out like mortars throughout social media. It’s one of many weirdest reactions to a online game I’ve seen in a few years. 

However I’m not right here to speak about that Highguard, the one which exists on-line as a battlefield for takes, opinions, movies, and discourse concerning the discourse. I’m right here to supply a essential take a look at the precise sport. The factor folks can play proper now. And that Highguard is much much less attention-grabbing than the dialog and the fiddle it. 

That’s maybe the largest downside going through Highguard because it enters into its second week leaking gamers like a toddler spilling juice from their first huge child cup. It seems Highguard simply isn’t very attention-grabbing. 

Bland and boring

Highguard is such a boring sport to have a look at. Builders Wildlight Leisure appear to have been unable to determine what sort of sport Highguard is, and the primary signal of that’s in the way it mixes collectively fantasy, sci-fi, magic, and trendy weapons. This mixing of genres and tropes will be executed effectively, however not in Highguard; each asset and mannequin has had any potential character and grit sanded down to make sure the assorted items mix collectively. 

They usually do mix. Completely. Too completely.  Nothing stands out. There’s no appeal. No quirks. Nothing to speak about with folks or publish on-line. It’s the form of sport that leaves your mind the second you cease taking part in it. 

I’ve performed over 14 hours of the sport now throughout many matches, and I wrestle to call a personality past Slade, an obnoxious blonde dude who’s the closest Highguard will get to creating one thing that has character. All people else is a generic powerful man or sneaky lady with clothes and armor that appears like what you begin an RPG with, after which rapidly change. 

It’s a disgrace that Highguard is such a forgettable-looking sport as a result of I do suppose the concept of a raid shooter is a cool idea. 

Let’s get able to raid

When a match kicks off, you begin at your base, decide a hero, and arrange defensive partitions. Subsequent, you and your two teammates experience out and seek for loot on the map. This principally entails rushing round in your mount and opening chests. The opposite crew is doing the identical, and also you may run into them. 

Ultimately, a big sword begins to type on this planet, and every crew must get to it, seize it, and take it to the enemy base to blast open their protect dome and raid the place. Do a superb job raiding and the match is over. Fail and this all repeats, however the loot on this planet will get higher. As soon as a crew pulls off a profitable raid, they win. 

This may sound sophisticated in comparison with a whole lot of different shooters in the marketplace, and it does take a while to learn the way this all works. However as soon as I did, I used to be having some enjoyable with Highguard. I all the time felt like my crew may come again and win. We had been only one superior raid away from victory.

• Again-of-the-box quote:

  “I feel certainly one of them is called… Val? Vai? Violet? One thing like that.”

• Developer

  Wildlight Leisure

• Sort of sport

  First-person sci-fi/fantasy MOBA-like PVP-only on-line raid shooter.

• Like

  Nice gunplay, mounts are cool, raids are thrilling.

• Disliked

  Efficiency issues, overly huge maps, bland aesthetic, too many concepts.

• Platforms

  PC, Xbox Sequence X/S, PS5 (Performed on PS5 Professional)

• Performed

  Performed about 12 hours on PS5 Professional and round 3 hours on PC with associates and solo.

• Launch Date

  January 26, 2026

And second to second, Highguard feels nice and jogs my memory of the graceful and snappy gunplay present in Titanfall 2. That is sensible contemplating the studio behind Highguard is made up of devs who labored on that sport. Breaking giant gems out on this planet between raids can also be extraordinarily satisfying. I equally loved establishing defenses at my base earlier than heading out to seek out upgrades. And chasing somebody down on the again of a mount is thrilling and never an expertise present in most different on-line shooters. Then you could have every character’s distinctive powers and talents, which might dramatically change a combat as you drop down a fireblast or whip up a giant wall of ice. Oh, and there’s a complete loot financial system, during which you must stability shopping for higher weapons with ensuring you could have sufficient shields to climate future firefights. After which…

Too many transferring components

Effectively, see, we’ve reached the opposite main downside with Highguard: It’s making an attempt to be every little thing. 

Much like its bland artwork fashion that makes it really feel just like the devs couldn’t commit to at least one concept and as an alternative tossed all of it in, Highguard’s gameplay is a seize bag of concepts and mechanics from different in style video games. And whereas it will be cool if we may simply put ice cream, pizza, wine, and meatloaf right into a blender and blend all of it as much as get one thing even higher, that ain’t how the world works. 

The quick, Name of Obligation-like gunplay means you die rapidly. This makes going out and entering into fights earlier than raids a chore. The improve and crystal financial system means you need to spend time looking down and breaking blue rocks, which, whereas satisfying to smash, compelling gameplay it doesn’t make. And positive, you get some foreign money from defeating different gamers, however late-game gear prices a lot and also you get so little from kills that in lengthy matches, I felt obligated to cease preventing and as an alternative go mining. The raids, simply the very best a part of Highguard, additionally make mounts principally nugatory, robbing the sport of certainly one of its coolest options. And solely having three gamers on either side makes raids really feel much less epic, and the bases you defend too huge. (Although the devs are already taking part in round with a 5v5 mode, which could assist.)

In different phrases, each bit of Highguard typically will get in the best way of the opposite items and might derail the entire expertise. 

Maybe Highguard will obtain weeks and months of updates to enhance a few of these issues. Maybe it should add a 4v4 mode to make the map really feel much less empty. Perhaps the time to kill, particularly within the early a part of matches, will probably be elevated so fights last more. 

However none of that may be capable to really repair Highguard. It will take much more work to do this. Highguard is a forgettable shooter that stuffs an excessive amount of into one sport and finally ends up being a generally enjoyable however uneven mess. At the very least it’s a multitude that almost all gamers gained’t bear in mind for lengthy after they log out.