Highguard Launch Struggles: Free-to-Play PVP Shooter Faces Poor Reviews, Low Engagement Despite Game Awards Hype

Highguard, the free-to-play PVP ‘raid’ shooter, was released yesterday and after a month of basically no contact, the game has performed poorly to start. The free-to-play game hit a peak of 97k players, impressive numbers, though so would argue for a free-to-play game not so much. Being the final trailer of The Game Awards 2025, meant expectations were already high, maybe even too high, and with a basically non-existent marketing campaign as we covered yesterday, no one had any idea what they were getting into.

Speaking with PC Gamer, Wilderlight Entertainment CEO and founder Dusty Welch acknowledged that some of the early shortcomings fell on the team to make a better trailer to show off their game:

Look, I wish Highguard had been received better. I wish the feedback had been better. Part of that's on us, right? We didn't put our heads in the sand. We, as a team, saw the feedback. We're gamers ourselves. We're online ourselves reading the feedback.

I think, ultimately, we could have made a different trailer—a better trailer that wasn't about entertaining, which is what we think The Game Awards was about. We could have made something that did a better job of highlighting the unique loop of the game. So that's on us. We take that, but the team is resilient.

Trailer choice might not be the only issue facing the game, with early Steam reviews being quite rough, currently sitting at a mostly negative. While early poor reviews might not have been fully unbiased, several .1 hours' played reviews littered the steam page within minutes of release. Twenty-four hours later, the real issues arose. Several complaints about poor PC optimization, the game for those curious runs on Unreal Engine 5, while others question the odd decision to make the game a 3v3 given the size of the maps.

While there is plenty of time for Highguard to rebound after a poor start, something we have seen in other live service games, a poor start is never what you want to see in a debut game title. 

Did you hop on Highguard day 1 what did you think? Does it deserve the criticism or is there a gem hidden in the rough once the issues get worked out? Leave a comment below and make sure you join us in our Discord TheGamerzTheory.