Wildlight Entertainment is a new team with a strong pedigree of talent, including team members who worked on Apex Legends. That experience is clear from the earliest moments of Highguard. The new competitive shooter showcases agile, precise shooting mechanics and enjoyable, fast-moving map navigation, meeting expectations many players may have if you’ve played Apex Legends. And once you get into real matches, it’s clear that the game has a rewarding new match structure at its core. Even so, I’ve struggled in my early hours to find the fun amid some confusing systems, limited variation in the play experience, and little visibility into the seemingly richly imagined fiction and setting on offer.
Highguard is an unusual title at launch, arriving as a free-to-play shooter with big ambitions to grab an audience, but with little to no detail about the game shared ahead of launch. That’s certainly not an obligation for game makers, but it has left the audience, myself included, scrambling a little bit in these early days to understand what the project even is.
After several hours of play, the picture begins to take shape. Players control Wardens, fantasy-inspired warriors of magic and elemental powers, but who also wield high-powered weaponry alongside their mystical capabilities. For reasons that don’t seem to be explained clearly, small groups of Wardens are battling each other, laying siege to the enemy team’s stronghold in the name of – well, that’s not entirely clear.
I love the colorful art style and the melding of fantasy and modern aesthetics that Wildlight explores here. But, without a PvE component or any especially clear accompanying storytelling or setup, I’m stymied a bit in this first day of play, trying to understand what’s happening and why. It is a competitive shooter, of course, and those elements are likely best left as background material, regardless. Here’s hoping the days and weeks that follow help to illuminate the lore and clarify that part of the project.
No matter why these Wardens are fighting, the main 3v3 raid mode is certainly novel. Each match is neatly separated into distinct phases of play. Players select between a number of base layouts and proceed to fortify that base with additional protection before venturing out into a large open map to gather weapons and armor, gear up, and even mine resources to buy additional upgrades. After a designated time window elapses, a Shieldbreaker relic spawns somewhere in the open field, and open conflict with the enemy team begins in earnest, as each allied squad aims to pick it up. Once in hand, you can deploy that Shieldbreaker against the enemy base, open its energy shield, and attempt to raid the interior in an effort to detonate explosives and take out the stronghold. If that effort fails, things reset, there’s another chance to gear up (this time with better gear), and the process begins again.
Taken piece by piece, there’s nothing there that’s profoundly complicated. But I’ll admit that I felt completely lost for the first several matches I played – unsure where to put my attention, when to engage in combat, what to prioritize when defending, and how to even meaningfully contribute to my team. In the long term, it’s possible that the very confusion I felt might be the game’s saving grace – a slightly more complex and freeform match structure that rewards creative play and strategy.
However, there are some other factors that hold back my endorsement at this phase. The single 3v3 raid mode is currently the only way to play the game, and at present, something about it just feels a bit barebones. The maps are, to their credit, very large and cleverly designed. But it means that I spent a lot of time wandering the environment, punctuated by very brief moments of exciting shooting exchanges. If the fantasy is one of besieging an enemy fortress, my initial impression is that the small player count feels out-of-sync with the concept and the map size.
While I don’t understand who they are or where they came from, the small roster of available characters all look and play splendidly. I like the asymmetric powers that come into play in a given match, depending on who I’m up against. And the mix of unique fantasy powers – like magical invisibility or a character who transforms into a massive beast – makes me eager to try everyone out and zero in on a favorite. I also really enjoy the speed and fun that comes from different mounts you can summon to gallop across the battlefield. These work great, add a sense of speed and momentum, and lend something new to the shooter equation.
Highguard is a thoughtfully designed game with strong movement and shooting fundamentals, and it’s trying something new within the genre. For that reason alone, I’m interested and excited to play more and better understand the flow of a given match. But it’s not an easy game to understand at first glance, and it lacks a breadth of play options I’d expect from a title that has ambitions to break into the scene.
We’ll have a full review after several more days of matches, so check back in for a more comprehensive rundown. In the meantime, Highguard’s free price of entry means you could give it a shot for yourself and see whether this new raid shooter concept might gel with your desires.
Highguard is available now on PS5, Xbox, and PC.