Highguard is the “famous” first person shooter announced during The Game Awards (yes, it’s famous for all the wrong reasons). Originally teased by Geoff Keighley as a “surprise” for the end of the show, fans were quite disappointed to see it be an otherwise generic looter-shooter style FPS game with fast-paced combat. YouTubers had a field day dissing the overall generic-ness of the game, calling it Concord 2 and whatnot (For context, Concord was Sony’s first multiplayer live-service title, which tried to be a competitor to Overwatch 2 – but failed so miserably that Sony had to offer refunds to customers as a PR exercise.) Needless to say, expectations from the game were not really high when it launched yesterday. I was also one of the skeptics who took a nose-dive into the game to understand what my experience really was. All I can say after a few dives is – Holy shit!
The Long, Long Night
I watched a couple of the videos dissing the announcement of Highguard during The Game Awards – so I kept my expectations in check before diving in. The game didn’t really offer a pre-load, which meant that downloading would take quite a while after the game launches (perks of living in a third-world country). It seems that downloading the game and hopping in wasn’t enough – I had to wait in a queue with possibly thousands of other players before I got a chance to experience the game myself. Considering the game is free to play, it was bound to get a lot of traffic on launch day. I’m surprised there was zero preparation for such an eventuality – I work in tech myself, and I know how many complaints we are going to get if we don’t scale up servers at launch for sales. My boss would have put my ass on a performance improvement program if we didn’t prepare for higher traffic on launch day – but the developers here seem to be chill with having a queue and not letting more people experience the game.
Needless to say, the queue took a long while. When I got in, the first thing that hit me was the design of the menu itself. The fonts, the placement of text, and even the background – the design looks uncannily similar to Apex Legends. This was an eventuality I prepared for, since many ex-Apex Legends and ex-Titanfall developers were working on the game, but seeing even fonts of text copied into a new title seems shoddy work at best. I decided to open the Collection – the place where they allowed the players to select a character for display, and to select a mount for them (What are mounts for? I’ll explain later). The design philosophy seems very similar to Apex Legends – they aren’t “ugly” like the characters of Concord, but they fall far off the standards presented by Overwatch. At this point, I can literally call it Apex Legends 2: Electric Boogaloo and no one can defend against that.
I also decided to check out the War Chest, which I thought was the in-game store for micro-transactions. The War Chest was nothing other than the battle pass, rewritten in a careful way to confuse players. The developers were generous enough to greet players with a free battle pass for the first month, knowing well that no one’s going to buy the battle pass from the next month onwards (I’d be surprised if someone even plays the game after a month if some of its glaring issues aren’t fixed). Skin design philosophy needs to be good for players to buy into the microtransactions, and I can say that a somewhat adequate amount of attention went into designing alternate outfits for the characters.
Riders on the Storm
I immediately invited two of my friends to Discord and decided to queue together into a match. We were surprised when I wasn’t allowed to queue – the “Play” button was just grayed out. After a lot of tweaking and researching, we found out that we needed to complete the tutorial. My friends left the party, and bam! They ran into a connection issue with the servers. This meant that they had to wait in line for quite a while before reconnecting. We all decided to do the tutorial, which was quite a long one, and explained most of the mechanics in detail. Finally, something I actually like about the game! Yes, the mechanics were long and tedious and seemed like a bastard child born from an orgy where Valorant, Rainbow Six: Siege, Apex Legends, Fortnite, and Overwatch were invited to – weird, but still something worth giving a try. Of course, just after I completed the tutorial, I faced the same connection issue as my friends, which meant I had to wait in the queue for a while before I could get in again.
After repeated disconnects, we finally got into a lobby together and decided to queue. Currently, Highguard only offers 3v3 casual as the only mode – there’s no other mode to get your game on. There does seem to be a ranked mode, but it’s currently locked (which also means it will probably never see the light of day). 3v3 is a really odd composition for me, almost as if the developers were not really sure about the scale of the game before they started building it. 5v5 is an industry-recognized format, with some games like Overwatch and Marvel Rivals having 6 players (not Overwatch 2 though, since tanks are too overpowered in the game for some weird reason). I’m probably overthinking, but the fact that developers only made a 3v3 mode and under-provisioned servers at launch probably meant they didn’t really expect the sheer number of players that they got. This doesn’t mean that matchmaking was perfect – we had to run into at least three games where players abandoned as soon as they joined, leading to the game getting cancelled.
The first time I queue in, textures take forever to bake. This means many distant structures look like blobs. Reducing the settings does help a bit, but it doesn’t alleviate the issue. The game has almost zero afterthought for optimization. This was an expected problem, since the demo shown during The Game Awards last year itself had issues with framerate consistency. Framerate tanks really hard in 1v1 close-range fights, making them impossible unless you have really beefy hardware. I was on an RTX 4060 and a Core i7 12700H with 16 gigs of RAM – not really the best hardware on the planet, but certainly enough to deserve playing this game on low-medium with no issues.
If framerate issues weren’t enough, the game’s mechanics were really weird. Highguard, for some weird reason, has quick-time events in a multiplayer game. There are special mineral nodes that we need to mine, which allow us to buy guns, special utilities, and armor (or upgrades of the ones we already have). This mining is governed by a quick-time event, which slows down mining if not timed correctly. I would really like to meet the product managers who thought such a feature was a well-deserved addition in a competitive multiplayer game – just to have a friendly chat, of course. We also have to reinforce our base or “fortress” so that the walls take one more bullet to be destroyed. Did I mention that we can destroy walls in the game? Yes, the scale of destruction is a nice addition – only if walls didn’t cave in like a house of cards on the slightest hint of bullet fire. Oh, walls collapsing also tank framerate like anything.
Sweet, Sweet Cheaters
Highguard got one thing right, and that’s probably the gunplay. Guns feel like they’re actually hitting targets, not like blanks, which do nothing. Despite that, gun balance is seriously lacking, with some guns being way too overpowered while others do barely any damage at all. I tried the Vector and Rail Gun – they both helped me do a complete team wipe on my own when my friends were killed. The assault rifles in this game deal less damage per second than most of the submachine guns, which is ridiculous. Also, armor is ridiculously bullet-spongy, especially in the late game when most folks have either Epic or Legendary armor. Did I also mention they have tiers of loot in this game, just like Fortnite and Apex Legends? Yeah, the developers did go all out to copy the best mechanics from their rivals and turn it into a mess worse than a gas station toilet.
Highguard also seems to take some mechanics from Rainbow Six in the later parts of the game, when someone has managed to breach the walls of the enemy base with a special tool called a Shieldbreaker. The Shieldbreaker spawns in the center of the map initially, and is contested by players for taking control of it – after which it is the duty of the team to plant it near the barriers of the enemy team’s “fortress”. If the plant was successful, a siege tower spawns, and players can start attacking the enemy base, planting the bomb in one of the designated “sites”. This part of the game is quite difficult with three players, unless all of them are really good in FPS games – it all boils down to wiping the enemy team out and then taking the time to plant and defend the bombs.
One thing that is sure to piss a lot of people off – Highguard requires Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 enabled. This means that I had to reboot, go into the BIOS, and get that enabled before I could play it initially. Easy anticheat runs at a kernel level and might even be responsible for some of the optimization issues that Highguard runs into. Despite such security measures, I faced off against a hacker in one of the games where one of the enemies had no spread in their guns – their bullets hit us like a laser ray, wiping us instantly. Initially, I thought that person was really good, but further inspection proved that they were hitting similar impossible shots without recoil on my friends, too.
High-On-Kool-Aid
Highguard is a game that hybridizes gameplay from multiple genre-defining FPS games and manages to have nothing unique of its own. The gameplay doesn’t make people feel like getting back to the game – you’re way better off playing Valorant, Fornite or Apex Legends than coming back to this game. It’s not really as negative as the Steam reviews say – but there are glaring issues in its gameplay loop that need to be fixed for the game to be “playable”. Also, optimization and technical issues really need to be solved to improve the player experience. For now, all I can say is that this is a game with some potential, but I doubt it’s going to go anywhere from there (since the developers seem to have already made up their mind about the game failing).
