Highguard Wasn't Finished
The Zenith of AAA Fatigue
I do my best to approach criticism with deliberation and care for the art form. Unlike many other critics, I never review a game I haven’t finished or, in the case of multiplayer-only experiences, played thoroughly. I tend to be a little behind the curve when I release my reviews because of this, but I’m confident that it makes my work more informative and trustworthy for you, dear reader. All of this is to say that the fact that I was only able to tolerate three matches of Highguard for this article is, in some ways, a review all its own. I’m not just here to write about Highguard; I’m also here to discuss what it says about our gaming landscape and what players really want to see.
Highguard, the newest game from some of the people who made Titanfall and Apex Legends, is blatantly unfinished. Shipping with a paltry eight characters, fourteen weapons, and one play mode with ranked matches “coming soon,” there is simply not enough substance to support the gameplay loop. What’s included generally lacks personality anyways, hovering in this uncertain hodge-podge of medieval and sci-fi aesthetics that never feels like an effective blend. Nothing sells me on this world or its characters, and the lack of meaningful variety amongst them means lots of players won’t find a good fit. Moreover, the game has absolutely terrible optimization. I can’t get it to look as good on Medium as last year’s Doom: The Dark Ages looks on low even with DLSS and my 8GB Nvidia 4060, which really shouldn’t be feeling that weak in 2026. The few times where things actually happened during a match were all marred by the game dropping frames due to particle effects and the like. Dark Ages is also vastly more fun while nailing the blend of fantasy and sci-fi elements… it honestly embarrasses Highguard on every front, but I digress.
Matches take place on huge maps with chests to loot and resources to mine like some weird combination of battle royale shooters and MOBAs, but both teams only have three players. The vast majority of a Highguard match is spent wandering around looking for arbitrarily-improved varieties of your gear and wondering when the hell you’re going to shoot something. The map is easily large enough to support Battlefield-style team sizes and squads and I’m left scratching my head as to why it simply doesn’t. After running around to gear up for a while, teams are encouraged to fight for the Shieldbreaker and use it to open up their enemy’s base, which does force at least some confrontations. Once a base is open, the fighting shifts rapidly to close quarters as the attackers attempt to plant bombs in the base’s small rooms. Efforts at reinforcing base walls largely felt pointless as everyone ran inside to scrap, and this isn’t the type of game where scrapping in close range feels good.
When encounters do start, the shooting feels sort of clunky and weak. Highguard tended to feel best in mid to long range encounters where there was room to use character abilities and take aim, but the disappointingly slow movement and the reliance on semi-random gear upgrades made the majority of fights feel mediocre. I’ll admit that this game takes after the kinds of shooters I’ve never enjoyed or been good at, but even outside of that bias, I struggled to find a moment where I wouldn’t have rather been playing something faster or less restrictive. Even my friends who are more accustomed to mainstream shooters didn’t find much fun in it. There’s really just nothing about the guns or character abilities that feels inspired. Even though the phases of a match are structurally unique, nothing around it really works in service of what it’s trying to do.
Ultimately, whatever inspiration lies within Highguard - and there is something in there somewhere - is buried under its half-baked design and visual malaise. As the title of this article indicates, my conclusion is that this should simply not have released like this. Given another year or two, the designers may have been able to tease out a lot more potential from this game. More characters and guns, larger player counts, more interesting base features like defensive weapons, and removing pointless weapon tiers in favor of more interesting map objectives could have turned Highguard into something genuinely unique and fun. That’s way too much to wait for in post-launch updates; the game needs to come out feeling complete to have that chance. The best thing I can really say about Highguard’s current state is that it didn’t cost me any money to be disappointed by it.
The fact that Highguard is a free-to-play, live service model is truly the root of its problems. If this was a beta test, players would be much more willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and let the devs have time to refine it. As it is now, it feels like something we see all too often these days - an utterly shameless cash grab rushed out of the door to make money off of whatever rubes they can convince to spend real money on cosmetics. Sure, there’s some clot of gamers that spends an absurd amount of money on copy-pasted Call of Duty games every year and Fortnite is still going strong as some kind of consumerist frankenstein of a game, but players at large are losing their patience for games which so blatantly feel like trend-chasers made to addict and capitalize rather than entertain or inspire. If Highguard were finished, it may have escaped such damning categorization, but the studio made the choice to release it like this and they will pay the price for it. As indie designers make more impressive games and gamers become more aware of them, this kind of focus-tested approach just isn’t going to work anymore.
If anything about Highguard gives me hope, it’s that gamers might be getting a little wise to what they’re being fed. The reaction to this game has been widely negative since its Game Awards reveal, and the best you can say about its release response has been that it’s “mixed.” The Steam user base’s capacity for drowning any game with poor PC optimization in negative reviews is as strong as ever with Highguard, and this is a case where it is exceptionally well-deserved. Gamers’ widespread rejection of such obvious bait and their acceptance of less competitive co-op experiences like Helldivers II and Peak gives me hope that players are finally starting to look outside of their comfort zones and appreciate games that aren’t just formulaic profit engines. More diversity in our popular landscape can only benefit the players, and I hope for the industry’s sake that the players really are going to start spending their time and money on more genuine experiences.
Yikes, that sounds rough. Sounds to me like their budget ran out, and they just shoved it out the door to at least recoup some of their money. Let's see how quickly they'll shut it down. Concord only lasted two weeks…