When you need a tool, you rarely reach for a Swiss Army Knife. It’s an option that only makes sense when you have no other options. Have you ever tried to actually cut wood with the shitty and very flimsy saw blade included in a Swiss Army Knife or any other similar kind of multitool? I have. It was a horrible experience, and I ended up buying a saw to finish the job. It turns out shoving many things into one package isn’t an effective way to make something good.
Anyway, have y’all played Highguard?
Released on January 26, Highguard is a (deep breath) free-to-play fantasy-sci-fi MOBA-like 3v3 PVP hero shooter with base defense and raid mechanics. It was first unveiled as the finale of the 2025 Game Awards and received a less-than-stellar reaction from people online. And since then, the conversation about Highguard has been very strange and oddly aggressive. People taking sides. Takes being shot out like mortars across social media. It’s one of the weirdest reactions to a video game I’ve seen in many years.
But I’m not here to talk about that Highguard, the one that exists online as a battlefield for takes, opinions, videos, and discourse about the discourse. I’m here to offer a critical look at the actual game. The thing people can play right now. And that Highguard is far less interesting than the conversation and the mess around it.
That’s perhaps the biggest problem facing Highguard as it enters into its second week leaking players like a toddler spilling juice from their first big kid cup. It turns out Highguard just isn’t very interesting.
Bland and boring
Highguard is such a boring game to look at. Developers Wildlight Entertainment seem to have been unable to decide what kind of game Highguard is, and the first sign of that is in how it mixes together fantasy, sci-fi, magic, and modern guns. This blending of genres and tropes can be done well, but not in Highguard; every asset and model has had any potential character and grit sanded down to ensure the various pieces blend together.
And they do blend. Perfectly. Too perfectly. Nothing sticks out. There’s no charm. No quirks. Nothing to talk about with people or post online. It’s the kind of game that leaves your brain the moment you stop playing it.
I’ve played over 14 hours of the game now across many matches, and I struggle to name a character beyond Slade, an obnoxious blonde dude who is the closest Highguard gets to creating something that has personality. Everybody else is a generic tough man or sneaky woman with clothing and armor that looks like what you start an RPG with, and then quickly replace.
It’s a shame that Highguard is such a forgettable-looking game because I do think the idea of a raid shooter is a cool concept.
Let’s get ready to raid
When a match kicks off, you start at your base, pick a hero, and set up defensive walls. Next, you and your two teammates ride out and search for loot on the map. This mostly involves speeding around on your mount and opening chests. The other team is doing the same, and you might run into them.
Eventually, a large sword starts to form in the world, and each team needs to get to it, grab it, and take it to the enemy base to blast open their shield dome and raid the place. Do a good job raiding and the match is over. Fail and this all repeats, but the loot in the world gets better. Once a team pulls off a successful raid, they win.
This might sound complicated compared to a lot of other shooters on the market, and it does take some time to learn how this all works. But once I did, I was having some fun with Highguard. I always felt like my team could come back and win. We were just one awesome raid away from victory.
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Back-of-the-box quote:
“I think one of them is named… Val? Vai? Violet? Something like that.”
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Developer
Wildlight Entertainment
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Type of game
First-person sci-fi/fantasy MOBA-like PVP-only online raid shooter.
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Like
Great gunplay, mounts are cool, raids are exciting.
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Disliked
Performance problems, overly big maps, bland aesthetic, too many ideas.
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Platforms
PC, Xbox Series X/S, PS5 (Played on PS5 Pro)
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Played
Played about 12 hours on PS5 Pro and around 3 hours on PC with friends and solo.
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Release Date
January 26, 2026
And moment to moment, Highguard feels great and reminds me of the smooth and snappy gunplay found in Titanfall 2. That makes sense considering the studio behind Highguard is made up of devs who worked on that game. Breaking large gems out in the world between raids is also extremely satisfying. I equally enjoyed setting up defenses at my base before heading out to find upgrades. And chasing someone down on the back of a mount is thrilling and not an experience found in most other online shooters. Then you have each character’s unique powers and abilities, which can dramatically change a fight as you drop down a fireblast or whip up a big wall of ice. Oh, and there’s a whole loot economy, in which you need to balance buying better guns with making sure you have enough shields to weather future firefights. And then…
Too many moving parts
Well, see, we’ve reached the other major problem with Highguard: It is trying to be everything.
Similar to its bland art style that makes it feel like the devs couldn’t commit to one idea and instead tossed it all in, Highguard’s gameplay is a grab bag of ideas and mechanics from other popular games. And while it would be cool if we could just put ice cream, pizza, wine, and meatloaf into a blender and mix it all up to get something even better, that ain’t how the world works.
The fast, Call of Duty-like gunplay means you die quickly. This makes going out and getting into fights before raids a chore. The upgrade and crystal economy means you have to spend time hunting down and breaking blue rocks, which, while satisfying to smash, compelling gameplay it doesn’t make. And sure, you get some currency from defeating other players, but late-game gear costs so much and you get so little from kills that during long matches, I felt obligated to stop fighting and instead go mining. The raids, easily the best part of Highguard, also make mounts mostly worthless, robbing the game of one of its coolest features. And only having three players on each side makes raids feel less epic, and the bases you defend too big. (Though the devs are already playing around with a 5v5 mode, which might help.)
© Wildlight EntertainmentIn other words, each piece of Highguard often gets in the way of the other pieces and can derail the whole experience.
Perhaps Highguard will receive weeks and months of updates to improve some of these problems. Perhaps it will add a 4v4 mode to make the map feel less empty. Maybe the time to kill, especially in the early part of matches, will be increased so fights last longer.
But none of that will be able to truly fix Highguard. It would take a lot more work to do that. Highguard is a forgettable shooter that stuffs too much into one game and ends up being a sometimes fun but uneven mess. At least it’s a mess that most players won’t remember for long after they log off.
English (US) ·