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Highguard First Impressions: No More Heroes

Highguard First Impressions: No More Heroes

Highguard launched to nearly 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, but the play count quickly dwindled. But is the PvP raid shooter good?

Written by Manas Mitul, Edited by David Delima | Updated: 16 February 2026 17:24 IST

Highguard First Impressions: No More Heroes

Photo Credit: Wildlight Entertainment

Wildlight Entertainment has announced layoffs, but will continue to support Highguard

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Highlights

Highguard was the final reveal at The Game Awards 2025
Wildlight Entertainment was formed by former Apex Legends, Titanfall devs
Highguard's player count has declined sharply since launch day

Highguard, the new PvP raid shooter from debutant studio Wildlight Entertainment, made quite a splash at The Game Awards 2025, perhaps for the wrong reasons. One would imagine that getting the final trailer spot at gaming's annual gala could only benefit an upcoming game. With millions watching live across the planet, it's the best possible advertisement and endorsement a game can get. But that scale of attention can also bring intense scrutiny.

Within minutes of the trailer going live, a large and vocal community of gamers that seems to be baying for blood ahead of every game release of late, dismissed Highguard as the next Concord. The internet was expecting Half Life 3 to be the closing act at The Game Awards. It got yet another free-to-play PvP hero shooter instead. And with Wildlight going radio silent until launch on January 26, Highguard was consigned to the ‘dead-on-arrival' shelf.

And while that was not quite the case, the perception formed at the reveal has ended up hurting a game that has promising, fresh ideas even if they are presented in an overtly familiar package. No, Highguard is not Concord. It's not Overwatch or Apex Legends either. It is primarily a raiding game, where two teams fortify their respective bases, gear up, and attempt to take down the enemy camp. And to the Wildlight's credit, that gameplay loop in a PvP hero shooter is largely new. Highguard's approach to a match is segmented and often clunky, but it does feel unique. Within that loop, however, a lot of the individual parts evoke a highly common aesthetic seen in hero shooters.

'Most of the Team' at Highguard Developer Wildlight Has Been Laid Off

And that leaves Highguard feeling like an experience you've had before. That isn't necessarily bad — most games today look and feel like some other game. Some even look and feel like five different games. But in the PvP hero shooter genre, already saturated with the likes of Overwatch, Apex, Marvel Rivals, and Valorant, where games live and die by their active player numbers, it leaves a new title like Highguard little room to breathe.

Usually, hero shooters are straightforward, even if they come with multiple game modes. A match is played between two teams attempting to attack certain objectives in a match — that may include escorting a payload or controlling a capture point. Highguard instead opts for a dynamic attack versus defend approach by adding a raiding component to its matches. Two teams of three players each select their home base from a selection of six strongholds and proceed to fortify it. Each stronghold comes with its own layout that presents unique strengths and weaknesses, and it's important to pick the right one that suits the abilities of your team of heroes.

Highguard gives you a short window to strategically reinforce certain walls in your base that hide generators. The raiding team targets multiple generators or the anchor stone to either chip away the defences of a base or destroy it in a single, riskier move. Once you've fortified the walls and finalised your loadout, you ride out of your stronghold on your mount to collect loot that includes better weapons and armour and other resources that help you in the raid. This forms the second part of the core gameplay loop in a Highguard match.

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Each base comes with its own layout in Highguard
Photo Credit: Wildlight Entertainment

Once you've picked up better gear from designated spots on the map, you compete with the other team to take control of the Shieldbreaker, a mythical sword that spawns at a location somewhere in the middle of the two strongholds. This is the first point in the match where you'll engage in PvP combat against the other team. The team that manages to gain control of the Shieldbreaker can proceed to attack the other team's base. However, before the sword has been used to break down the shield protecting the opposing stronghold, the other team can try and intercept the team with the Shieldbreaker, pick up the sword, and change the tide of the game.

Once a team carrying the Shieldbreaker has successfully reached the enemy base and managed to weaken the defences, a Siege Tower is summoned to break the shield completely. Now, the raid — the final and most crucial section of Highguard's gameplay loop — begins as the attacking team infiltrates the stronghold and targets the weak points to destroy the base and win the match. This loop repeats in a tug-of-war for control until one base is completely destroyed.

Once you fortify your base, you ride out on your mount to loot better gear
Photo Credit: Wildlight Entertainment

Taken in totality, a match in Highguard brings something new to the table to the hero shooter genre. Its distinct gameplay loop combines elements from different games to present something new. Matches can be wrapped up quickly, or they can be drawn-out affairs with teams exchanging attack and defend roles over the course of a round. This makes Highguard feel dynamic and tactile, especially with the many moving parts of its composite gameplay loop.

The variety of maps and bases available at launch adds necessary depth, too. Each of the six bases features a distinct layout, ranging from simple to complex, and requires slightly different strategies to attack and defend. The Bellringer base, for instance, features multiple tall towers, elevated generator room locations, and an open courtyard, making it ideal to defend at long range from strategic positions. Frosthold, on the other hand, is a Viking-style base with a large interior that presents a large arena for direct combat.

Maps in Highguard are expansive and perhaps too big for 3v3 matches
Photo Credit: Wildlight Entertainment

Maps, of which there are five at launch, feel visually distinct, too. They offer a generous amount of verticality and variety and are quite expansive. In 3v3 raid matches, however, the maps feel bigger than they need to be. This ends up draining intensity and urgency from encounters when you do end up facing off against the other team. Wildlight has now introduced a 5v5 raid mode at the request of players, which feels better suited to big maps, but lacks the strategic team versus team dynamic seen in games like Overwatch and Marvel Rivals.

Perhaps Highguard's biggest problem is that its individual ideas struggle to come together to form a compelling online PvP match. The distinct parts of the gameplay loop often feel like they are competing against one another. As a result, a raid in Highguard feels clunky and not quite sure of itself. The looting segment, for instance, feels merely a race against the clock. If Wildlight could introduce tighter looting areas that foment team versus team encounters, then the time spent finding better gear would be more tense and urgent.

Highguard's PvP encounters lack tension and urgency
Photo Credit: Wildlight Entertainment

The push and pull for the control of the Shieldbreaker sword is the most dynamic part of the gameplay, where the result of PvP encounters can tilt the direction of the entire match. Raiding enemy strongholds is fun, too, but defending your base when you're being attacked feels unbalanced. Base defence needs deeper gameplay tactics than merely fortifying select strategic walls and hoping you can foil the attack. The gunplay itself is serviceable, but the hero abilities feel heavily inspired from other hero shooters. Highguard's character designs, however, feel original and richly detailed, even if they broadly follow genre conventions.

Highguard's inspirations are perhaps most obvious in the visual department. The game's art style is a close twin of the aesthetic pioneered by Overwatch and imitated in almost every hero shooter released since. Played side by side, Overwatch, Marvel Rivals, and Highguard look like they're cut from the same cloth. A distinct art style would have helped Highguard establish its own identity not tied to the genre itself.

Performance on PC doesn't acquit itself well, either. We tested the game on a rig provided by CyberpowerPC India, which features a 13th Gen Intel Core i5-13400F processor, 16GB DDR5 RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card, and 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD (PCIe Gen4). With everything set on ‘High', the game struggles to hit 60fps consistently on 2K resolution. Turning the graphics preset to ‘Medium' allows Highguard to run at 65-70fps, but with framerate drops in busy encounters and environments.

Highguard's art style and gameplay struggle to stand out from other hero shooters
Photo Credit: Wildlight Entertainment

In its current state, Highguard lacks the depth and variety to compete with hero shooters that have been around for years. The game essentially launched with a single mode, and while the developer has been quick to take player feedback and implement new features, the road ahead looks rocky. Highguard would have benefited from an extended early access launch, which would have allowed Wildlight Entertainment to iterate on the game and fine tune it to players' liking.

Despite being light on offerings, Highguard does not deserve the overtly harsh and bad faith comparisons with Concord. It's almost as if scores of players rooted for the game to fail. Despite Highguard's misfortunes seeming like fait accompli, there are clever ideas here that, with time and updates, could come together to make a fun PvP hero shooter. But Wildlight, a new developer that needs its first game to work, may not get that time needed to turn things around.

Highguard

KEY SPECS
NEWS

Genre Shooter

Platform PC: Windows

Modes Single-player

PEGI Rating 16+

More Wildlight Entertainment Games

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Further reading: Highguard, Wildlight Entertainment, PC Gaming, The Game Awards 2025, Apex Legends, Overwatch, Hero Shooter, Marvel Rivals

Manas Mitul

Email Manas Mitul

In his time as a journalist, Manas Mitul has written on a wide spectrum of beats including politics, culture and sports. He enjoys reading, walking around in museums and rewatching films. Talk to Manas about football and tennis, but maybe don’t bring up his video game backlog. More

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Highguard First Impressions: No More Heroes

Highguard

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