Highguard Is Just Fine, and That Will Be Its Downfall

According to the vitriol of the internet over the past month, I may have been in the minority in thinking that the Highguard trailer at the end of the Game Awards was cool. Well, me and Geoff Keighley, that is.

Since that debut in December, a lot of the internet rejoiced in ripping apart the trailer and deriding the radio silence. Fellow writer Gary Wilson shared last week that he had a sneaking suspicion that developer Wildlight Entertainment had wanted to shadow drop the game but that Keighley had swooped in with an offer the devs couldn’t refuse; this has since been confirmed in an interview with PC Gamer. Even if the marketing plan wasn’t sound, I was surprised by how focused these influencers’ critiques were — when the game wasn’t even out!

Now that it is, I’m not sure Highguard will really please anyone.

It is not bad enough to warrant hate pieces. It is not good enough to warrant applause. I intended to review Highguard this week, assuming I’d either be spectacularly impressed through either fault or excellence. However, after playing for an hour on launch day, I was really just nonplussed.

Highguard’s Gameplay Is Passable

Highguard’s shooting combat plays like every other extraction shooter out there, which is what most of the game’s tutorial is focused on. And, of course, this pales in comparison to the reality of gameplay when you get one-shot-killed by another player as a sniper you didn’t even see. Once you get back in the zone of online shooting, the moment-to-moment combat is deeply familiar and unexciting.

In comparison, Highguard’s more unique elements get no airtime at all. The atmosphere has potential to be exciting, but there’s just no context or follow through. Here are a few places where I felt that disconnect:

• There’s absolutely no explanation as to why there are cool phantom horses (or panthers or bears) that can pop in and out of existence but also be killed. Truthfully, I was most compelled by the presence of horses, but they function exactly like land speeders and with as much personality. They seem to be just fuel for microtransactions.

• There seem to be interesting characters (more on that later), but you can’t choose different characters in the tutorial so it’s hard to figure out what all of their powers are. I just chose whoever looked cool and pressed my supers at random. Some of the powers were exciting, others underwhelming. I couldn’t keep track of who did what.
• The settings and music are satisfyingly rich or medieval feeling, but I have no idea WHY we’re doing anything or WHERE we are.
• Characters can occasionally inexplicably open rifts to magically transport back to base. While it’s useful for traversing the large maps, it is another lost potential for storytelling as it is not given any context framing whatsoever.

Highguard asks you to dive in and shoot simply because that’s what you do in these games. Perhaps if I was trying to prove myself as the new leader of this land or protect my village or harvest some magic crystal for an important reason, I could rally myself into the otherwise familiar combat. But unfortunately, it’s a lot of decoration without a lot of substance.

Not Structurally Sound

On a moment-to-moment level, Highguard’s gameplay is perfectly fine, but its broad structural choices are baffling.

Gary and I agreed in The Punished Backlog’s Discord that we just didn’t understand why there was a full two minutes of “crafting,” which consisted of a boring mining mini-exercise, followed by exchanging these mysterious crystals at the shop with a guy who can teleport around the field (I guess). It slows the game down to a standstill. Similarly, the respawn rate is 15 seconds, which feels like an eternity when you’re trying to keep the gameplay feeling active. Furthermore, the map feels really big for only 3-versus-3 gameplay; I feel like 5v5 would feel more dynamic. It’s way too easy to wander around the map harvesting rocks and not run into anyone else.

Key to Highguard’s gameplay loop is protecting your own base or invading another. However, there’s really not much to do about protecting the base other than fortifying walls, which is just a simple button click. You have the option to select different bases at the beginning of a match, but the game will recommend which one is best so there’s really no point. It might be interesting if I could run around setting up turrets or convincing an NPC to shoot fire arrows or something, but there’s just a whole lot of nothing. Why create so many spaces just to have the same rote defense mechanisms for each?

Furthermore, because the base loses power not through “wins” or “losses,” but rather through timed takeovers, it varies how much damage you’re really able to do. Thus, the base’s health bar moves down at inconsistent rates; I watched my husband play a match yesterday in which the other team held on for a surprisingly long amount of time with 5 hit points left, even though other actions took down 30 hit points easily. It was annoying, to be honest. There were extra rounds, including overtime, even though my husband’s team was decimating the other. Gary noted that he was surprised the game wasn’t a “best two out of three,” which would’ve meant that the match ended at an appropriate time.

Each match of Highguard just takes too long. In comparison to the furtive hunting and gathering of games like Fortnite or Apex Legends, Highguard’s downtime just feels like a waiting game.

Under the Influence

So much of the game reminds me of Apex Legends, and unfortunately, Highguard just made me wish I was playing that instead. The running, sliding, and first-person view (even where the players’ hands/guns sit) all feel the same. The ping system doesn’t even feature in the tutorial, so in most matches I played, no one even used it. Weirdly, Highguard’s button for activating a superpower is the same button as Apex’s genre-defining ping system, so I kept accidentally using my power when trying to communicate with team members. It makes sense that so much of Apex is in Highguard’s DNA, given that Wildlight is filled with ex-Respawn employees, but it’s hard not to just remember the original.

Highguard asks you to dive in and shoot simply because that’s what you do in these games.

One of the highlights of Highguard are the characters’ potential. At one point, when I went to the Trader Flynn (who introduces himself by saying, “I’m Trader Flynn, but you can just call me Flynn,” which was such a confusing and boring piece of dialogue), he said, “Oh hello, Princess!”

I turned to my husband with delight and I shouted, “I’m a princess?!” He shrugged. I continued, “Maybe we’re all princesses and we’re like trying to protect our kingdom or something!” But no — only that one character, Scarlet, was an ex-princess and of what kingdom I know not.

The character art is interesting and their powers seem varied, similar to the diverse and exciting Apex Legends roster, but they were so in the background. I was surprised not to see an opening video showcasing them all; I understand that cinematics are expensive, but it seemed like a wasted opportunity to make me care about — much less know — who these figures are. In comparison, Apex Legends launched with an exciting in-game video that set out super broad strokes of a plot while highlighting many characters’ skill sets.

In addition, the game’s core concept of base raids are fun but don’t reinvent the wheel. I like the concept of taking over a specific space and employing a strategy, and the cinematic when “shieldbreaking” with the larger-than-life siege tower did make me say, “Sick!” out loud.

The base invasion loop reminded me of my favorite modes of Destiny 2: capture the flag in Crucible and Gambit. Both enable a focused kind of mission-oriented gameplay. Unfortunately, Highguard’s relatively lethargic speed of gameplay made me pine for Apex’s exciting, fast-paced base takeover mode called Control, which featured a frenzied 9v9 on a smaller map.

Again, Highguard isn’t bad. (Some people love it!) But once the initial hype (which in itself is somewhat spurred by the marketing controversies) dies down, I don’t think it does anything differently enough to hold attention.

The Competition

The online shooter scene is crowded. There are so many games, many of which are free-to-play, that you can really take your pick. Like your guns with crafting? Fortnite. Like your guns with alien PvE? Destiny 2. Like your guns classic style? Halo. Like your guns with more guns? Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds. Like your guns with robot PvE? Arc Raiders. Like your guns with superpowers? Overwatch. Like your guns with superpowers that are also on the big screen? Marvel Rivals. Like your guns with real world vibes? Call of Duty. Like your guns with mechs but oh wait no one else did? RIP Anthem. Like a game like this but just different in some way? Wait for Marathon.

In short, Highguard does a few interesting things, but not enough to make it stand out from the pack.

So this is all to say… Even after the internet’s collective obsession, Highguard is FINE. I played about an hour’s worth of matches yesterday on launch day, and then (once I quit out to dive into Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the first time) I watched my husband play for about two. He was much better at it than me, so I asked if he was having fun and if he would be continuing with it. He shook his head.

Perhaps if I hated Highguard more, I would’ve been compelled to play more of it to constitute enough playtime for a fair review. Instead, it was just good enough to keep playing last night, but not good enough to keep playing today.