Highguard (2026): The Review

Overview

Highguard is, quite literally, an attempt to reinvent the wheel for competitive team shooters. It’s an admirable swing, too, the core loop makes sense on paper, and watching it in motion, you can absolutely see flashes of something special. The potential is there, no question. But a handful of fundamental problems with its mechanics and overall flow drag the whole thing down, creating friction where there should be momentum and pushing away both seasoned genre fans and curious newcomers alike. If those cracks aren’t smoothed out quickly, the experience risks feeling as hollow as its sprawling maps, a bold idea left without the substance to support it.

Score: 6 out of 10

Note: After finishing writing this review, a good chunk of Highguard's development team has been laid off, which kinda means it's official that the game is dead. Now, it's a just a matter of "enjoying" the game while it's on life-support. Sad for the people fired but not completely surprising. 

The Positives ✅

Highguard gets one major thing right immediately: it’s trying to be different. In a genre that’s been eating its own tail for years, battle royales everywhere, hero shooters chasing the same two giants, “new” tactical games that feel like reskins, this one swings for the fences with a PvP raid concept that genuinely doesn’t feel like business as usual.

And weirdly? It works. On paper, mashing base-building, looting, pseudo CTF, and bomb-planting into a 3v3 team shooter sounds like a design document written at 3 a.m. after eight energy drinks. In practice, Wildlight somehow stitches those ideas into a loop that makes sense once you’ve played it. It’s not easy to sell in trailers, but it clicks fast when you’re actually in it.

The Raid Phase is the undeniable highlight, the moment where everything finally ignites. Summon the Siege Tower, crack the shields, and suddenly you’re in nonstop mid-range chaos where every ability, angle, and push matters. When Highguard is in this mode, it feels tense, tactical, and genuinely hype in a way most shooters can’t fake.

Teamwork also feels natural rather than forced. Coordination isn’t just “nice to have,” it’s the entire point, and when your squad syncs abilities to wipe the enemy team, it feels like you just pulled off a highlight reel play. That kind of dopamine hit is real, and it’s the clearest sign the concept has legs.

Finally, it’s hard to ignore the value proposition: it’s free-to-play, and its live-service design is unusually forgiving. Battle Passes that don’t expire is a genuinely player-friendly choice, and even if the game is rough around the edges, it costs nothing to see whether its strange little subgenre experiment is your thing.

The Negatives ⚠️

Highguard’s biggest problem is that the foundation feels unfinished. There’s basically no narrative context, no meaningful worldbuilding, no character grounding, just tiny lore snippets stapled to skins that read like trivia without a story to anchor them. In a vacuum, it all feels like fluff rather than flavor.

The maps are a much bigger issue, though. For a 3v3 game, the spaces are too large and too empty, with not enough points of interest to justify the scale. The early phases quickly turn into long stretches of jogging around collecting resources you don’t really need, which makes the match pacing feel like it’s stuck in molasses.

That problem is compounded by the loop repeating after a successful defense. You get the exciting Raid Phase… and then you’re sent back into the same slow “gear up” routine again. Instead of escalating, matches can feel like they’re spinning their wheels, too much filler between the parts that actually sing.

Gunplay also isn’t doing it any favors. Shooters live and die by how weapons feel, and here the time-to-kill is so long that guns can start to feel like pellet launchers. Even in early Raid phases with modest armor, it can take absurd amounts of damage to secure a down, and it’s hard to read consistency across weapons, some are clearly outclassed in ways that feel accidental rather than balanced.

Then there’s the technical mess: poor optimization, limited graphics options, unstable performance even on strong PCs, and visuals that end up looking worse than they should because you’re forced to dial everything down just to keep frames stable. Add uneven character balance on top of that, and the rough edges stop being “quirks” and start being real friction.

The Experience 🎮

My first few hours with Highguard were honestly a blast. With a full squad, the confusion turns into discovery, and the game’s oddball loop starts to feel like a new language you’re learning mid-firefight. When it’s clicking, it feels like you’re improvising tactics on the fly and making game-winning plays through coordination, not just raw aim.

The best moments came from teamwork that felt earned. A clean chain of abilities, a perfectly timed push, a wipe that happens because you outplayed the other team instead of simply outgunning them, those highs are why the game feels like it could become something special with the right tuning.

Then my squad logged off, and the cracks got loud. Playing solo makes the slow phases feel even slower, and the empty map design becomes impossible to ignore. Without friends to fill the downtime with chatter and planning, you feel every unnecessary minute of wandering, mining, and looting.

And the gunplay issues hit harder when you’re not in perfect sync with teammates. Dumping mags into someone and getting punished anyway because their teammate blindsides you, or because their kit is overtuned, feels awful. When shooting doesn’t feel consistent, every death feels less like “I got outplayed” and more like “what even happened?”

Still, I can’t deny the potential. Highguard is a genuine attempt to evolve the genre, and even in its messy state, it offers a type of match flow I haven’t really felt anywhere else. If Wildlight tightens the maps, fixes pacing, stabilizes performance, and tunes guns and kits, I could absolutely see myself coming back casually, because the core idea is too interesting to write off.