Highguard Review: A Bold Idea Without Bold Execution

They say any press is good press, but Highguard's much aggrieved reveal as The Game Awards 2025 finale unfairly soured its reputation before it had a chance to show what it can offer in a competitive live-service market. Wildlight Entertainment's raid shooter is trying to be ambitious, with bouts featuring two teams of three as they fortify, loot, fight, and siege in matches that can last anywhere from a handful of minutes to three quarters of an hour.

Highguard's central conceit is novel and quite compelling, but in achieving its vision, the game is an amalgamation of familiar concepts that don't necessarily tally up to be more valuable than the sum of its parts. There's a lot to like about Highguard, and it's a game that's easy to learn, so it's almost immediately enjoyable. A lack of depth and an inability to fully achieve its ambitions throw its long-term viability as a competitive shooter into question, though.

Highguard Is A Jack Of All Trades, Master Of None

Highguard is a game that manages to do a lot of things quite well, but doesn't excel in any one facet. It incorporates many familiar FPS mechanics, but in doing so has spread itself thin. Its base defense doesn't have the sophistication of Rainbow Six Siege. Each Warden's abilities don't feel as impactful as those in Valorant or Overwatch. Looting and itemization is very linear in comparison to something like Apex Legends, veteran developers of which founded Wildlight.

But Highguard is its own game, and does manage to mix these influences cleverly. A match has four stages, though they tend to overlap. After selecting your character and voting on which fortress you'd like to defend, you have a brief period to fortify your base with stronger walls. A looting phase follows, in which you're free to explore a fairly large map – on foot and by summoning your mount – and find weapons, armor, utility items, and consumables.

Points of interest line the center of the map, and in one of the three, the Shieldbreaker will eventually spawn. The two teams will fight over the powerful sword in an attempt to deliver it to the opposing base. Planting the Shieldbreaker at a fortress's perimeter opens up a section of its dome shield and begins a raid, giving the attacking team a limited number of respawns as they attempt to plant bombs on three sites.

Two bomb sites will deal damage to the enemy's collective health, while detonating the third will end the game immediately. A stalwart defense can damage the attacking team instead, and following the conclusion of a raid, provided both teams still have HP, the cycle restarts with another looting phase. It sounds convoluted at first, but it only takes a match or two to understand Highguard's cadence.

Highguard's Combat Is Interesting & Varied, But A Lot Of Downtime

Mechanically, Highguard is solid. With the usual suspects regarding weapon variety, firefights can be tense, and a smartly used character ability can give you the upper hand. There are also some interesting concessions in the interest of gameplay. For instance, your and your teammates' footsteps are much quieter than your opponents', so positioning and movement come into play in much the same way they might in a tactical shooter.

Thanks to the scale of Highguard's maps, the scope of a skirmish can vary wildly. I find its close-quarters combat to routinely be more interesting – when fighting over the Shieldbreaker or during a raid – but the occasional sniper duel out in the open can be satisfying as well. Highguard is clearly structured to provide an ebb and flow when it comes to combat, but said ebbs are unfortunate hindrances.

The way each map is set up, with the two fortresses at the ends and a midline of POIs, the looting phase is often devoid of interaction with the enemy team. You spend a few minutes mounted, riding as fast as you can between treasure chests and the bright blue crystals used for currency. There's no need to stay alert, because you'll be able to hear an opponent approaching well before you see them.

Looting phases thus become quasi-intermissions. They're almost like a buying phase in Counter-Strike, without the convenience of being solely within a menu. They're made more tedious by the way Highguard dispenses its item rarities. At the beginning of a match, you'll only find blue items, one step above the gray items you started with. After one raid, purple items become available, and after two raids, gold items become available.

The result is that legendary items don't feel particularly exciting, since they're practically guaranteed to everyone in the match as long as it lasts long enough for that rarity to become available. And you don't really have to work for them; loot chests are replenished after each raid, so you can just go back to the exact same loot route and find incrementally better stuff.

Having some relative downtime between Shieldbreaker scrums and raids is a commendable design choice. When you do come out of a second raid with each team on the brink of defeat, it can genuinely feel like a reprieve. But then you spend a couple of minutes doing what you've already done twice: opening chests, breaking crystals, and buying items from the trader.

Highguard Looks Big, But Doesn't Feel Big

Highguard's large maps end up feeling like an excuse to ride your mount around and shoot guns from its back, which is, admittedly, very cool. Mounts having small health pools and long resultant cooldowns actively deters extended mounted combat encounters, though. They end up being little more than a means to move faster, which doesn't help the open map design feel any less tedious.

It's easy to hypothesize about minor changes that might make the action more consistent, like larger teams, smaller maps, or MOBA-like cannon fodder, but we have to assume Wildlight performed its due diligence in playtesting to fulfill this vision of Highguard. It's a game that presents itself dramatically, and the raids are almost convincing. The siege tower rolling up to the shield and splitting it open as each team prepares to engage is a wonderful crescendo. And then there are just six people in a scrap.

There's a real dissonance between Highguard the idea – gearing up to duke it out over an artifact for the chance to assault the enemy's stronghold – and Highguard the game. It's executed quite well, and I've been enjoying my time with Highguard, but I can't help but feel there's a significant lack of gravitas in practice. Nothing feels wrong with Highguard, necessarily; it's not trying to put a square peg in a circular hole. It's more like putting a circular peg in a larger circular hole – it works perfectly fine, but it's not quite right.

Highguard has an identity crisis. It wants to be a tightly designed, competitive shooter, but it's too large and empty to keep up the requisite pressure. It also wants to be an ambitious new kind of game, but its focus on small-team firefights diminishes any sense of real scale. I must commend Highguard for trying something genuinely novel and compelling, and I hope its ongoing development can shirk the premature vitriol thrown at it and mold it into an even better video game.

Highguard ultimately isn't likely to blow you away, but it's more than competently designed. All of its myriad parts have something fun to offer, they just don't line up immaculately. Being free-to-play, Highguard is not a hard sell; the difficulty is in getting players to overcome their potentially poor first impression from its melodramatic announcement. Highguard has hit on something very fun and quite different, even if it's bundled in familiar mechanics, and I think it has potential to flourish if some post-launch tinkering is done.