Highguard review: after a week, it feels like wasted potential

Wildlight's shooter is a misfire, but not just because the internet says so

When Polygon's Austin Manchester previewed Highguard, he was in the perfect setting: a closed-door event with other members of the press, all communicating and strategizing. It’s the ideal way to experience a team-based multiplayer game like this, showcasing the best case scenario for the game’s ceiling if enough people take to it. Playing Highguard in a "live" environment though, aka when the game is available to the public, is an entirely different experience.

Highguard, the debut game from Wildlight Entertainment, got a bad rap the moment it was revealed. The final announcement at last year's The Game Awards, it was slated for being yet another multiplayer live service shooter, but there were legitimate concerns it was unfairly overhyped because expectations are always astronomically high for the very last game on show. Unfortunately, the internet was right: Highguard does suck. Or at least it does when you're going in solo.

Highguard's biggest problem is that it's a mashup of too many ideas. At its core, this is a first-person shooter where two teams of three duke it out to destroy their opponent's base, MOBA-style. However, there's Rainbow Six Siege-style base fortifications, Overwatch-style hero abilities, survival game-inspired resource mining and gathering, vendor trading, and more. Together, it culminates in awkward pacing, despite the foundational FPS elements clearly showing the expertise of the team behind the game.

There are moments of brilliance to be found in shootouts. The reflexive combat and crisp shooting, when each weapon shreds through enemy shields and your chance of success comes solely down to who the better shot is and who has mastered the movement mechanics, it's so clearly inspired by Apex Legends. Problem is, these moments are few and far between.

Here's how an average Highguard match is structured: The game begins with a short window to select your starting loadout and reinforce up to five walls at your base, to protect your bomb sites. When you're allowed to leave, you must explore the, quite frankly, colossal map in search of both weapon and armor chests, alongside "vesper," currency you can mine to exchange with a charismatic vendor, for other equipment. Eventually, the Shieldbreaker (an enormous sword, a la Excalibur) will spawn, which is the most important item in the game.

With the Shieldbreaker in hand, you're able to destroy the shield protecting the enemy base, allowing you to begin a raid. Therefore, there's always a skirmish whenever it spawns, and whichever team emerges victorious can leg it to the other side of the map. By this point, though, there's been up to five minutes of what is essentially dead air, with action only in the closing moments. The action kicks off when the raid begins, but it's often over before you know it, especially if you're up against a coordinated team. If the attacking team successfully whittles down the defending team's base health, the match is over, or if they're still standing, the whole cycle (including those minutes of dead air) begins again.

Playing Highguard solo absolutely sucks. It's so clearly a game that is built for team play and communication, which I'm willing to bet is part of the reason it's been almost universally panned since launch. The few games I played with a friend, constantly calling out where enemies are, what our approach will be, and which weapons we were using to complement one another's loadout, were by far the best time I had with the game.

There's no evidence that the game was designed for teamplay more than the fact the looting phase is so quiet. Riding around the map on your mount, catching up with pals about the latest episode of Fallout or sharing your thoughts on 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple before pushing for the Shieldbreaker and getting into the thick of it — It's as if Highguard was designed to be a space to hang out, rather than ramp up the intensity from the get-go.

Playing solo, on the other hand, means you're often left twiddling your thumbs, exploring a map devoid of much of interest that is far, far too big for the team sizes. If the opposing team isn't on the ball, you could well nick the Shieldbreaker and begin a raid without even seeing another player. The decision to make it just two teams of three seems baffling, as opposed to more teams of the same size (imagine how intense it would be with four teams, each with their own base to defend), or simply bigger team sizes.

Highguard’s ideas are so half-formed that you can’t help but become a backseat developer when playing it. Remove the half-baked wall fortification aspect in the first phase — let us put down other forms of traps or gadgets instead, or get rid of it entirely — because it's effectively useless, especially if the other team has a Scarlet, who has the ability to temporarily delete any wall. Scrap the concept of mining for currency while you're at it, and the slow paced Borderlands-esque looting phase.

Introduce a PvE element, so there's at least some action for most of the match, even if it isn't much of a threat, and tie higher-tier weapon unlocks — or currency drops to spend at the vendor — to those. Condense the maps, because even though that might make mounts redundant, they serve absolutely no purpose other than to traverse the land. Those are the kinds of thoughts that are bound to cross your mind in the absence of cohesive execution.

The design of the matches themselves feels off, but Highguard is similarly half-baked in its essentials. There are no player stats. You can't report other players or vote to forfeit a match. Ranked play doesn't exist yet. It launched without fairly essential graphical and accessibility settings, and although those have now been added, it still leaves you with the uneasy feeling that a project with potential was incredibly rushed.

In its current state, I'm unsure what gap in the market Highguard thought it could fill. While the bones of it are solid, it's so unengaging most of the time that the moments that do bring excitement aren't worth waiting for. When there are other games that do all the individual components Highguard offers but better, this ambitious genre-defying shooter offers very little. It feels like an early access release that needs to go through a few more iterations before finding what works.

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Highguard is out now on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on Windows PC. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.