Have you ever ever performed a recreation that has a nugget of one thing particular in there, however simply isn’t fairly hitting the mark? That principally sums up our time with Wildlight Leisure’s Highguard.
This can be a PvP raid shooter, which can sound like one thing new, however in actuality, there’s a bit of one thing of hottest shooters stuffed into this one.
There are base defensive reinforcements like Rainbow Six Siege. You’ve gotten a tiered armour and weapons looting loop, considerably akin to Fortnite (or most battle royales, for that matter). And there are even hero characters with distinctive passive, tactical and supreme abilities, similar to Apex Legends.
Does that make it spinoff? Probably not, as a result of placing all of those parts collectively does ship one thing a bit completely different, albeit one thing that received’t be for everybody. However let’s begin with what you’ll be doing in every match.
A group of three will begin with the flexibility to fortify partitions of their base. Inside are two small mills and one massive generator. It’s your job to guard these mills whereas making an attempt to destroy these within the enemy group’s base.
Then comes the gearing up part, the place you and your group will head out to gather Vespa (a crystal foreign money that may be spent at a vendor), armour, and weapons. You’ll rush round atop your mount as you seek for higher gear, and you may run into the enemy group at this level.
Then comes the Shieldbreaker, a sword that’ll spawn into the map, and should be captured and carried to the enemy group’s base to interrupt down their base’s protect, in order to start out a raid.
As soon as a raid has commenced, you could have a couple of minutes to both assault or defend mills, with the little mills doing round 30% harm to a base, and the large one wiping it out completely.
Whichever base runs its well being right down to zero will lose the sport.
You’re seemingly pondering that that is fairly a sophisticated construction for a multiplayer recreation, and in some methods, you’d be proper. It takes just a few matches to actually get into the swing of issues with Highguard, and when you do, it’s full of loads of highs and its fair proportion of lows.
Highguard feels nice to play on PS5. You possibly can really feel the pedigree slightly below the floor of all of it, with weighty weapons, sensible animations, and clean traversal. Together with the myriad skills obtainable by means of the eight Warden characters, skirmishes really feel tactile and might be plenty of enjoyable.
The back-and-forth construction of matches additionally leads to a extremely dynamic feeling multiplayer expertise. One minute you’re nervously getting in place because the enemy’s siege tower batters at your base’s partitions, the subsequent you and your squad are charging in direction of the enemy base atop horseback with the shieldbreaker in hand.
In that means, it looks like Highguard is catering to the likes of Valorant gamers – individuals who love tactical team-based shooters. If that’s you and all of the items fall into place, there’s a lot enjoyable available right here.
Nonetheless, as a result of it’s a recreation that requires excessive ranges of group play, it may be a nightmare in the event you’re enjoying with randoms. Everybody actually must have a way of the sport’s construction to work properly collectively, and with a fast time-to-kill, you’ll wrestle to go up towards something greater than a one-on-one – a problem in case your teammates go walkabout.
After we’d sunk just a few hours into the sport, we realised that it is at its finest when it tightens issues up – so the bottom defence or attacking.
The looting up part all the time feels comparatively uninteresting, as you smash crystals and open bins which might be a whole lot of metres aside. And if we run into one other participant at this stage, more often than not we simply run away. There isn’t any tactical benefit to partaking in fight, as you simply respawn seconds later.
We then began to query the fortifying stage of the sport, too. You are capable of infuse partitions with iron, which suggests they cannot simply be destroyed by an axe. However each participant is provided with a raid device, which may then simply destroy fortified partitions anyway. And that is on prime of Wardens that may both bypass or destroy partitions with their very own skills. It feels a bit of pointless.
We additionally get the sense that the sport is not fairly positive the place it desires to lean visually. The bottom map designs and character fashions really feel fairly cookie-cutter, with a mash of weapons in a high-fantasy setting. However then skins can be found by means of the shop that vary from Roman troopers to Dune-inspired outfits.
There are three sorts of foreign money — one in all which is the premium paid foreign money — however we by no means obtained the urge to grind the sport so we might purchase extra skins, nor did we get that “yet another spherical” sensation, which is essential to the multiplayer shooter.
We performed the sport on the PS5 Professional, though it needs to be famous that there’s not but a Professional Enhanced model. Regardless, we discovered the sport runs fairly easily, and it seems fairly sharp. There are not any efficiency choices, however fortunately, an FOV slider was added to consoles post-launch.
Sadly, DualSense help is principally nonexistent, with primary rumbles accompanying gunfire, with no use of haptic suggestions or adaptive triggers.
Conclusion
Highguard has potential, nevertheless it’s not fairly being met but. Because it stands in the present day, it is a enjoyable but bloated shooter that lacks the spark you’ll discover in different video games within the style, like The Finals. It’ll play to the tactical gamers on the market, and evidently Wildlight is dedicated to bettering the sport. However with a recreation mode that crams each kind of shooter right into a single expertise, Highguard is a jack of all trades and grasp of none.
