Have you ever played a game that has a nugget of something special in there, but just isn’t quite hitting the mark? That basically sums up our time with Wildlight Entertainment’s Highguard.
This is a PvP raid shooter, which may sound like something new, but in reality, there’s a little something of most popular shooters stuffed into this one.
There are base defensive reinforcements like Rainbow Six Siege. You have a tiered armour and weapons looting loop, somewhat akin to Fortnite (or most battle royales, for that matter). And there are even hero characters with unique passive, tactical and ultimate skills, just like Apex Legends.
Does that make it derivative? Not really, because putting all of these elements together does deliver something a bit different, albeit something that won’t be for everyone. But let’s start with what you’ll be doing in each match.
A team of three will start with the ability to fortify walls in their base. Inside are two small generators and one big generator. It’s your job to protect these generators while trying to destroy those in the enemy team’s base.
Then comes the gearing up phase, where you and your team will head out to collect Vespa (a crystal currency that can be spent at a vendor), armour, and weapons. You’ll rush around atop your mount as you search for better gear, and you can run into the enemy team at this point.
Then comes the Shieldbreaker, a sword that’ll spawn into the map, and must be captured and carried to the enemy team’s base to break down their base’s shield, so as to start a raid.
Once a raid has commenced, you have a few minutes to either attack or defend generators, with the little generators doing around 30% damage to a base, and the big one wiping it out entirely.
Whichever base runs its health down to zero will lose the game.
You are likely thinking that this is quite a complicated structure for a multiplayer game, and in some ways, you’d be right. It takes a few matches to really get into the swing of things with Highguard, and once you do, it’s filled with plenty of highs and its fair share of lows.
Highguard feels great to play on PS5. You can feel the pedigree just under the surface of it all, with weighty guns, brilliant animations, and smooth traversal. Along with the myriad abilities available through the eight Warden characters, skirmishes feel tactile and can be a lot of fun.
The back-and-forth structure of matches also results in a really dynamic feeling multiplayer experience. One minute you’re nervously getting in position as the enemy’s siege tower batters at your base’s walls, the next you and your squad are charging towards the enemy base atop horseback with the shieldbreaker in hand.
In that way, it feels like Highguard is catering to the likes of Valorant players – people who love tactical team-based shooters. If that’s you and all the pieces fall into place, there’s so much fun to be had here.
However, because it’s a game that requires extreme levels of team play, it can be a nightmare if you’re playing with randoms. Everyone really needs to have a sense of the game’s structure to work well together, and with a quick time-to-kill, you’ll struggle to go up against anything more than a one-on-one – an issue if your teammates go walkabout.
After we’d sunk a few hours into the game, we realised that it’s at its best when it tightens things up – so the base defence or attacking.
The looting up phase always feels comparatively dull, as you smash crystals and open boxes that are hundreds of metres apart. And if we run into another player at this stage, most of the time we just run away. There’s no tactical advantage to engaging in combat, as you just respawn seconds later.
We then started to question the fortifying stage of the game, too. You’re able to infuse walls with iron, which means they can’t just be destroyed by an axe. But every player is equipped with a raid tool, which can then just destroy fortified walls anyway. And that’s on top of Wardens that can either bypass or destroy walls with their own abilities. It feels a little pointless.
We also get the sense that the game isn’t quite sure where it wants to lean visually. The base map designs and character models feel rather cookie-cutter, with a mash of guns in a high-fantasy setting. But then skins are available through the store that range from Roman soldiers to Dune-inspired outfits.
There are three kinds of currency — one of which is the premium paid currency — but we never got the urge to grind the game so we could buy more skins, nor did we get that “one more round” sensation, which is crucial to the multiplayer shooter.
We played the game on the PS5 Pro, although it should be noted that there is not yet a Pro Enhanced version. Regardless, we found the game runs rather smoothly, and it looks quite sharp. There are no performance options, but thankfully, an FOV slider was added to consoles post-launch.
Sadly, DualSense support is basically nonexistent, with basic rumbles accompanying gunfire, with no use of haptic feedback or adaptive triggers.
Conclusion
Highguard has potential, but it’s not quite being met yet. As it stands today, this is a fun yet bloated shooter that lacks the spark you’ll find in other games in the genre, like The Finals. It’ll play to the tactical players out there, and it seems that Wildlight is committed to improving the game. But with a game mode that crams every type of shooter into a single experience, Highguard is a jack of all trades and master of none.
