TL;DR: Highguard has a cool siege fantasy, solid gunplay, and a great core idea, but too much downtime and too little scale keep it from greatness. Worth trying, easy to enjoy, hard to love.

I went into this Highguard review fully prepared to be cynical. Not because I wanted the game to fail, but because I’ve been around long enough to recognize the smell of a live-service shooter that talks louder than it plays. Big promises, operatic reveals, slow-motion swords clashing against shields during an awards show crescendo. You know the drill. And yet, after spending real time inside Highguard, I walked away conflicted in a very specific way: I liked it more than I expected, and less than I wanted to.

Highguard is one of those games that feels like it was born from a whiteboard absolutely drowning in great ideas. Fortresses. Raids. Mounts. A legendary sword that literally cracks open an enemy base like you’re reenacting some lost fantasy epic with assault rifles. On paper, it sounds incredible. In motion, it’s good. Sometimes very good. But rarely great. And that gap between ambition and execution is where this live-service shooter quietly struggles.

The core fantasy is immediately compelling. Two teams of three Wardens, each holed up in their own shielded fortress at opposite ends of a massive map, circling each other like duelists who also happen to own siege equipment. You vote on your base, fortify it, then ride out into the wilds to loot weapons and gear while jockeying for control of the Shieldbreaker, the big glowing “this is how the game ends” sword sitting dead center. Plant it, crack the dome, trigger a raid, and suddenly the match snaps from wandering preparation into high-stakes violence.

The cadence makes sense quickly, and that’s one of Highguard’s quiet strengths. For all its systems, it’s approachable. You’re not drowning in menus or inscrutable mechanics. If you’ve ever touched a modern shooter, your muscle memory kicks in almost instantly. The problem is that familiarity cuts both ways.

Highguard borrows confidently, sometimes a little too confidently. Its base defense never reaches the white-knuckle tension of Rainbow Six Siege. Character abilities feel serviceable but rarely clutch, especially when you’ve spent years being spoiled by the game-changing ultimates of Valorant or Overwatch. Looting exists, but compared to the elegant chaos of Apex Legends, it’s rigid and oddly predictable.

And yet, none of that makes Highguard bad. In isolation, its systems work. They just don’t stack into something transformative.

A typical match becomes a rhythm you can almost set a watch to. Prep your base. Loot the outskirts. Clash over the Shieldbreaker. Raid. Repeat. The first time through, it feels fresh and dramatic. The siege tower rolling in, the shield splitting open, alarms blaring as both teams brace for impact. It’s genuinely cinematic.

By the second and third loop, the cracks start to show.

The looting phase, in particular, feels like Highguard accidentally built an intermission and forgot to give it tension. You mount up, follow the same efficient chest routes, smash glowing blue crystals for currency, and buy incremental upgrades from the trader. Enemy encounters are rare and usually telegraphed from a mile away, thanks to how sound design heavily favors awareness over surprise. It’s less scavenging under threat and more grocery shopping between gunfights.

What really deflates the excitement is how item rarity is gated by time instead of effort. Blue gear early, purple after one raid, gold after two. If the match lasts long enough, everyone gets legendary toys. They stop feeling legendary. Compare that to the adrenaline spike of finally affording a key purchase in Counter-Strike, and Highguard’s progression feels oddly ceremonial, like the game is politely handing you better gear because you showed up.

Combat itself is where Highguard redeems a lot of this. Gunplay is tight, readable, and satisfying. Close-quarters fights during raids are easily the best moments, full of frantic repositioning and clutch ability usage. The design choice to dampen friendly footsteps while amplifying enemy movement subtly pushes engagements toward smart positioning rather than twitch reflexes, and I appreciate that restraint.

Long-range fights exist too, and they can be fun, but they’re rarely memorable. The maps are huge, but they don’t feel alive. They feel like space. Beautiful space, sure, but mostly empty.

Mounts should be the answer to that emptiness. And visually, they almost are. Charging across the map on a panther, rifle blazing, feels like a power fantasy ripped straight from a trailer editor’s dreams. In practice, mounts are fragile, disposable, and clearly designed to discourage prolonged combat. They’re taxis with teeth, not tools of domination.

That design choice makes sense from a balance perspective, but it also highlights Highguard’s biggest identity problem. This game looks massive. It sounds massive. It stages itself like a war. Then it delivers six players gently skirmishing in spaces built for something larger.

There’s a dissonance here that’s hard to ignore. Highguard wants the emotional weight of a siege and the competitive precision of a tight arena shooter. Those goals are not mutually exclusive, but in this case they’re awkwardly stitched together. The result is a game that feels perpetually one tweak away from coherence.

I don’t doubt that Wildlight Entertainment tested this vision extensively. Nothing here feels broken. Nothing feels amateurish. It just feels slightly misaligned. Like a circular peg dropped into a larger circular hole. It fits. It just rattles.

And that’s the frustrating part. I enjoyed my time with Highguard. I kept queueing for matches. I kept thinking about how close it was to being something special. The raids can genuinely sing when both teams are battered and desperate. The Shieldbreaker fights can feel mythic. The foundation is solid.

But ambition without follow-through leaves an echo instead of an impact.

Highguard isn’t going to blow your mind, and it’s not going to redefine the live-service shooter. What it will do is offer a competent, occasionally thrilling experience that feels refreshingly different even when it’s leaning heavily on familiar mechanics. Being free-to-play helps its case enormously. The real challenge will be convincing players to look past the melodrama of its reveal and give it the patience its ideas deserve.

Verdict

Highguard is a thoughtful, well-built raid shooter with a strong central idea that never fully commits to its own sense of scale. It’s fun, accessible, and often impressive, but held back by downtime, predictable progression, and an identity that can’t quite decide how big it wants to feel. With smart post-launch tuning, it could grow into something genuinely special. Right now, it’s a promising draft rather than a finished statement.