Highguard Review: Mid at Best, Why This Raid Shooter Falls Flat

Highguard has finally arrived, and after bursting onto the scene at The Game Awards a few months ago. Everyone has been waiting to see what was so great about the game to justify the final trailer spot. Coupled with a basically non-existent marketing plan, which we have since learned was intentional, no one really knew what to expect besides a single trailer. After playing for several hours on launch, I can say I won't be apologizing to a certain someone anytime.

Highguard might best just be changed to Midguard, because that's just what the game is, mid. Combining several aspects from high profile games over the past few years, including the developers owning Apex Legends. The game falls into this void of where it does a bunch of things okay. Nothing about the game is better than the titles it borrows from.

3v3 is the Best Format, Kinda…

I do want to address one of the major complaints I keep seeing about the game that I feel is right for the wrong reasons. A common sentiment I have seen is the map is too big for 3v3, and that 3v3 is the worst mode for the game. I heavily disagree with this when it comes to the current game mode. Yes, when you first load in and see the map, it's massive, and you feel like a majority of it is wasted when battling out over small parts. However, the actual bread and butter of the game, how you win and lose games, takes place on small bases barely bigger than a bomb site in Valorant. Not to mention attackers can only enter from 1 side of your base, any more people who make these attacks and defending moments feel just overcrowded.

The true issue is that the game decided to tunnel vision itself into a 3v3. As a Halo kid growing up, the first thing I felt loading into a game was a true sense of nostalgia for Big Team Battles. Imagine if you ditched the base component and could queue into a 10v10 on a massive map. What Highguard failed to do was take advantage of the map they had created in different ways, instead locking the game, currently, into a forced 3v3 mode. Very few live-service FPS titles lock themselves into just 1 game mode. Outside of Battle Royals, which Highguard is never going to be, you need variety to be successful. If you want to focus on a particular mode for balance purposes, that's fine, but refusing to give players a choice about what they want to queue for is perhaps the biggest mistake Highguard made.

Borrowed Ideas, Flawed Concepts

The game is broken down into 4 phases: base reinforcement like you would see in Rainbow 6, material, gun, armor collection from Fortnite, objective battles from Overwatch, and finally offense/defense base combat commonly found in games like Valorant. What you end up with is this really awkward bouncing back and forth between short-range and long-range combat and no true identity to the game.

Game play is relatively simple for anyone familiar with the titles or their competition I just mentioned. Each team starts with 100 HP on their base, capturing the Shieldbreaker — the neutral objective you fight over, allows one team to siege the enemy base, which just by starting a raid, as it is called, takes 30 HP away from the defenders. From there you have three choices, planting A or B and holding the charges until detonation subtracts 35 HP, while planting the core and defending it is an automatic win. During this time, attacks will receive only 6 lives, spent when someone respawns. If the defense is able to hold out and stop the attacks from taking all of their base HP, the game resets and the phases start again until one team loses all the HP on their base.

I Just Want To Shoot Someone

A major issue of this setup is the downtime that comes with the first two phases. Base defense is as simple as running around fortifying walls, and while you can fight the enemy team during the gather phase, it provides zero benefit, meaning for over two minutes the game actively encourages no PVP interaction. Additionally, as I mentioned, the game bounces between long-mid-range fights over the shieldbreaker, and close-quarter combat defending or attacking bases, but players cannot swap loadouts on the fly after selecting one during the prep phase unless you loot it in the open world. Making usually highlight guns like snipers tough to commit to as they lose almost all impact when defending a base. Pigeonholing players into an AR/Shotgun combo that I felt forced to run most games.

Highguard currently features 8 heroes from a varying array of “classes”, though oddly enough, some classes have multiple choices, such as defender and assault have two characters, while others, like support, are limited to only one currently. Each comes with a low cooldown spell and an ultimate. As one would expect, the ultimates are slow charging and meant to be game-changing. Except ults can take several minutes to charge, and often if the game is a stomp, I found myself unable to use my ult because the game simply ended too fast. Leaving me feeling like my character was basically hamstrung.

What We Have Is A Lack of Planning

Overall, Highguard suffers from just being best described as “eh”. While the mechanics are unique and innovative, they do not do enough to move the needle either way, leaving the game at a solid 5/10. Truly medium, and while I do think there is hope for a rebound, launching the game and immediately being plagued by PC optimization issues is never a good start. Even one of its small benefits, being only 18gb compared to the Titan file size of another FPS, the game's first update required a full reinstallation of the game, which Steam still lists as no major updates found. While reinstalling 18gb is not much, the fact the game itself is already struggling with updates is not a sign of good things to come.

This game needed a better plan to be successful, relying on being a shadow like Apex Legends and going viral was not going to work, host an open beta, get player feedback on the glaring issues missed during development. Maybe Highguard had a real shot, but going from the final trailer at The Game Awards to, in essence, a shadow-drop was always going to result in exactly what happened.