Announced with a bang at The Game Awards. With nothing but silence from the studio afterwards. Highguard didn’t look like a solid release when the first trailer dropped, but I had high hopes for the game.
Made by a studio composed of developers who have worked on Titanfall and Apex Legends. How could I not?
And you know what? The first-person shooter pedigree shows, for sure. However, solid movement and shooting can only carry a game so far, and ultimately, Highguard doesn’t deliver at the moment.
Highguard
Highguard is a fast-paced, free-to-play PvP “Raid Shooter” that blends tactical hero-based gunplay with the base-raiding mechanics typical of survival games like Rust. Set on a mythical continent, you play as a Warden, an “arcane gunslinger” who combines traditional firearms with powerful magical abilities.
The game is structured around high-stakes matches between teams (typically squads of three). Instead of just fighting for kills or capturing a point, you are fighting to protect your own fortified stronghold while attempting to infiltrate and totally dismantle the enemy’s base.
The core aim
The fundamental goal of Highguard is to destroy the enemy base’s power source (the Anchor Stone) while keeping your own base intact.
The game loop is built on four distinct pillars:
- Fortify & Gear Up: At the start of a match, teams choose and reinforce their base. You then “mount up” on creatures (like armoured bears) to ride across an open map, scavenging for weapon upgrades, armour, and resources to prepare for the coming siege.
- The Shieldbreaker: Periodic magical storms spawn a legendary sword called the Shieldbreaker. The core objective of the “mid-game” is to fight for control of this sword; it is the only tool that can pierce the enemy base’s massive energy shields.
- The Raid: Once your team secures the Shieldbreaker and reaches the enemy base, you summon a Siege Tower. This initiates a “Raid Phase” where the game shifts from open-field combat to intense, close-quarters destruction. You must blow up walls and plant bombs on generators to expose the base’s core.
- Escalation: If a raid fails, the shields go back up, and the game “escalates.” All loot in the world is upgraded to a higher tier, and a new Shieldbreaker spawns, making the next round even more chaotic and high-powered.
This is all well and good, but it’s 3v3, and because of that, the core conceit all falls apart. Highguard has high aspirations, but just doesn’t deliver.
The good
Let’s be positive, though. This is a new game from a new studio, and whilst the overall game just flounders (more later), the fundamentals are exceptional.
Movement, abilities, riding mounts. Highguard is a blinder of a game if we take it at the base level of how good it feels to play.
Even the base defence/setup feels like a mythical Rainbow Six Siege. Looting and getting materials is fine, too.
It all works well, mechanically speaking, and Highguard feels great. But that’s about it, unfortunately.
The bad
3v3 on a map this big, with a game focused on a tug of war-style attack/defend game, is just too few. The minute a couple of you get wiped out, it’s so long to get back into the flow of things.
The entire match feels empty until you inevitably converge on the Shieldbreaker or when the siege tower comes in. Then, if the siege fails, it’s back to an empty map and collecting stuff until the process starts again. The loop, in theory, is fun. But in practice, it feels sparse, and the action isn’t satisfying enough to make up for it.
Beyond that, whilst it looks lovely, Highguard has some pretty generic-looking heroes. Cool abilities, for sure, but nothing that hasn’t been seen or done before.
Overall
I really wanted to enjoy Highguard. As an eternal contrarian, I was so ready to say people are just being dicks after that weird announcement. But whilst it feels solid fundamentally, Highguard feels quite hollow inside.
I hope that the studio gets to put more time into it and that it finds a robust core fanbase. I’d love for it to succeed and to come back to it. But when a game has me sitting there thinking,” When will this be over?”. I can’t give it any more time for now.
It’s a shame. But there’s always tomorrow.
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