So, Wildlight Entertainment’s new first-person shooter, Highguard, has been released to the masses after weeks of near radio silence due to the “not-so-positive reception” from its TGA 2025 announcement. The game promoted itself as a “new breed” of shooter, and seems to be playing around some big ideas, from the unique bases that each team will have to raid and defend, to the semi-destructive environments that players will have to use in order to break their way towards objectives. Many people were quick to brand Highguard as “Concord 2.0”, and while some of the resemblance to the failed hero shooter was there, I personally did not want to jump on the mockery train, because unlike Concord, Highguard is a free-to-play title, so new players will have nothing to lose but their free time.
So after a very brief download (which was only around 20GB) and a few matches played, I feel like I have seen everything the game currently has to offer. While I feel like the game has some potential, my time spent playing Highguard on PC has shown me that, in its current state, it is an experience with too many ideas that have been mashed together, like a bowl of soup with too many flavors mixed together without taste testing to see if the flavors complement each other.
Gameplay and Features
The main game mode featured in Highguard is a siege mode where two teams of three heroes (called Wardens) compete to raid and destroy each other’s bases. First, there’s a gearing phase where players must gather loot and resources around the map. Next, the intercept phase, where both teams have to fight over a magic sword called the Shieldbreaker, to open up an enemy base. Once a base has been opened up, the raid phase begins. You have to destroy or defend one or two generators from getting destroy, CS style, while taking out as many enemies as possible. These three phases repeat in a loop until a win condition is reached from each base raid attempt. Each base has 100 points, and destroying generators or eliminating opponents depletes a set amount of points. The first team to lower their opposing team’s points to zero wins.
Seems simple enough until you see the many different types of gameplay elements they managed to cram into a single match.
Have you ever played Apex Legends, Rainbow Six: Siege, Paladins/Realm Royale, Counter-Strike/Valorant? Then congratulations. You’ve basically played Highguard.
Borrowing from Apex Legends, the heroes have very basic kits to use in combat, where each hero has one active ability, one passive, and one ultimate. And just like with Apex, the hero abilities can help in a pinch during key moments, but are never powerful enough that you feel like they are mandatory for every enemy engagement. 90% of your battles are going to be solved with bullets over special abilities, so there’s very little need to form any particular hero composition with your three-man squads. And as they are, none of them are really all that engaging to play as.
Mounted combat, while a cool idea, loses its novelty quickly, as your ability to hit any opponent while mounted is difficult. It’s fine to use if you want to try and cause a distraction for the enemy team, but you’re going to be better off dismounting before engaging in firefights. Also: unless you have orange level mount armor, it’s very easy for your mount to get shot down. Even worse: there’s a split second where you will be locked into an a falling down animation when your mount is shot down , basically leaving you vulnerable to enemy fire.
While you’re at your base, there’s familiar gameplay element akin to Rainbow Six: Siege, where you have to reinforce walls and buildings in places where you feel that enemies might attempt to breach from. But during the beginning of the match, each player only has five reinforcement plates for walls, and players will have to either loot more wall reinforcers from the map or mine ore and trade them at the vendor NPC. It’s just a dead air activity that feels like it’s designed to kill time before the intercept phase begins, and it doesn’t help that most players can destroy your walls easily, even with reinforcements. Since the game includes rocket launchers, breach hammers, and heroes with different abilities that are made for destroying buildings in one swoop, it makes the act of wall reinforcement feel pointless.
During the gearing phase, there are several chests with different rarities that you can open up and find either guns, armor, and pedants for buffs and passive bonuses, which is, again, something that feels straight out of Apex Legends, or perhaps just Fornite, PUBG, or any battle royale shooter, really. The gunplay also feels similar to Apex, as all the pistols, rifles, SMGs, shotguns, and sniper rifles all have that same particular weight and recoil when compared to their counterparts, although I would say Apex has the edge over Highguard, simply based on sound design and some rather unique mechanics and upgrades that Apex has perfected over the years. I would also say the movement feels similar, except that sliding down slopes doesn’t seem to pick up speed or momentum, so unless I am timing my slides wrong, getting around on foot won’t lead to any unique movement techniques.
The gunplay in Highguard feels awful, but this isn’t because of how the guns handle. They actually handle as well as they should, but due to sync issues with the game server, hit registration can make the gunplay feel terrible. There were many times where I felt like my shots were landing properly, but my enemies still managed to eliminate me first. Even when I got the drop on enemies, and I poured near entire clips into an enemy’s head, yet they somehow managed to turn around and take me out. Of course, that could just be a skill issue, but many other players have also expressed the same concerns.
There’s too much downtime while playing during the gearing phase, where you’re just running around on your mount, opening chests to get gear, in these wide open maps that are simply too large for the game’s current 3 vs 3 siege mode. It’s such a weird mix of pacing between two moments of condensed action and one moment of looting. With how the maps were designed, I can’t help but feel like they had plans for larger team sizes, given the amount of ground players need to traverse on their mounts just to reach objectives, but they settled on 3 vs 3 for some reason.
And speaking of bases: There are several unique bases that your team can choose from at the start of a match, each with different layouts and hazards to choose from. While I can see the general idea behind it, where each base can favor different defensive playstyles, most players always seem to pick the “recommended” base each time, so it will probably take a while before we see any base picks that the community would find optimal and meta.
From my few matches played, there were very few moments where I felt like I even had a fighting chance. Either me and my squad managed to snowball the entire match after winning the first team fight, or the enemy team was doing the same to me. There were very few moments where, me and my opposing team would go back and forth on engagements, causing the match to cycle through the gear and intercept phases more than once. And even when those moments happened, I did not feel any rush or excitement from winning these fights. There was no sense of joy from playing, or anything that really pushed me to keep playing after each match.
Visuals and Presentation
Highguard presents itself with a tech fantasy theme, with heroes walks around with outfits that are either modern-esque or medieval looking, all while riding on mounts like horses, bears, lions or gryphons, and brandishing stylized versions of Bullpups and AK47s,. Usually I would be cool with theming like this, as many games have manages to pull off this theme with high regards, but the way Highguard handles this theme is simply too… safe. It doesn’t particular try to push this theme into any unique direction and it just all feels like something that a boardroom of accountants would come up with. The environments themselves are nice to look at, but they don’t lend themselves to any feelings of whimsy or wonder. I personally didn’t feel any desire to want to learn more about the world of Highguard, so any potential lore that could be hidden in the maps will be lost on me.
For anyone who is curious: “Does the game have any DEI/Wokeness”? Simply put: No, doesn’t. While the current eight heroes (called Wardens) are all fairly diverse, the males look like males and the females look like females, and the designs of the characters do not look particularly unsettling. And judging by backstories for each hero on the website, it doesn’t seem like they’re using these characters as vessels for agenda pushing. That being said: The characters do not look particularly good, either. Their outfits aren’t very cool, and what is being offered within the in-game store wasn’t much better, either. It’s all very safe and generic, and the personalities of the Wardens aren’t very interesting.
It’s been said before from other commenters before me, but character design and personalities can really make or break the game’s appeal, especially in a game where your heroes are placed front and center, and it really makes me appreciate other games that manage to do it right. If there’s one thing I will say that Highguard and Concord have in common, is that they present themselves with heroes that are so plain and soulless, you have to go out of your way to make creations that are this bland.
Final thoughts
The way I see it: Highguard is a game that has one too many ideas, and doesn’t execute on any of those ideas well enough. It tries to be Apex Legends while having slightly worse gunplay than Apex Legends, It tries to have mounts like Paladins even though the mount system gets old quickly. It tries to have base fortification like Rainbow Six: Siege, even though the game gives you so many tools to negate base defenses (and is just a boring activity in general). It has bomb defusal like Counter-Strike, even though it’s not as fun because it’s just one small element of the overall game. The concepts behind Highguard’s gameplay loop could have been neat, but it’s all so poorly executed that none of it even matters.
The maps being way too big for 3 vs 3 is an issue, as the flow combat could be improved drastically by increasing the lobby sizes to 10 vs 10, maybe even more. 3 vs 3 could work as another game mode with smaller maps and less downtime from team fights, but as it stands, it’s simply too boring for most of the game. And that isn’t even to mention all the performance and optimization issues the game has been having, with many players reporting graphical stuttering, freezes and other performance issues that make the game even more unfun.
Despite all the negative things I have to say: I do think this game could actually survive and find an audience if the development team at Wildlight manages to buckle down, take all the feedback in, and make some much needed changes to improve the game and its pacing. Sadly, considering how they seem to be allergic to feedback, as their launch day video on YouTube has locked the comment section, I have my doubts.
I think it’s safe enough for me to say that Highguard isn’t quite Concord 2.0, but if the devs don’t act soon, it very well could meet the same fate as Concord.
This review was something that I felt like doing ever since Highguard was revealed, as I missed out on the negative hype over Concord, and didn’t want to miss out on this. I don’t plan to do more game reviews, but if anyone else would like to see more reviews (perhaps from DEI/Woke games), let me know on Twitter.
