Highguard Has Launched, But People Are Criticizing It

Highguard opened its doors to the public yesterday evening, January 26th, as regularly promised since the Video Games Awards in December, where it was showcased as an "end-of-show treat" – also raising a hornet's nest of perplexity. It is therefore probably no coincidence that Wildlights Entertainment's new Free-to-Play Shooter has immediately become the target of much scrutiny.

And as often happens with an online multiplayer game, especially when it is released without prior public Beta sessions, launch problems were not long in coming. The PC version, in particular, seems to be garnering negative comments, so much so that the game's Steam page already shows a whopping 18,800 user reviews with a "mostly negative" rating.

The problems, needless to say, are the most classic: poor performance and lack of optimization despite using decent-tier PCs are at the top of the list, but also matchmaking issues with long waiting queues and being kicked from matches. Things seem more stable on consoles, where, however, excessive blur and generally a graphical rendering not up to current market standards are being criticized.

From a gameplay perspective, users report that the game's maps are too vast for a 3vs3 title, which makes clashes between the two teams infrequent and uninteresting, leading to the suspicion that they were originally designed for a 5vs5 but were more difficult to manage. To make matters worse, the "things to do" in the game are rather limited: in these overly large maps, the only thing to do is wander around in search of crates with weapons and power-ups, at most collecting crystals to exchange at the merchant, while waiting for the item that allows you to assault the enemy base to unlock.

In short: many of these criticisms seem to be the typical first-minute perplexities towards a game that certainly has ample room for improvement. We will see if this margin will be filled in due time or if Highguard will turn out to be a forgettable meteor...

Highguard is available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.