Have you 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 Entertainment’s Highguard.
This is a PvP raid shooter, which can sound like one thing new, however in actuality, there’s just a little one thing of most well-liked shooters stuffed into this one.
There are base defensive reinforcements like Rainbow Six Siege. You have 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, identical to Apex Legends.
Does that make it spinoff? Not actually, as a result of placing all of these parts collectively does ship one thing a bit completely different, albeit one thing that received’t be for everybody. But let’s begin with what you’ll be doing in every match.
A crew of three will begin with the flexibility to fortify partitions of their base. Inside are two small turbines and one large generator. It’s your job to guard these turbines whereas attempting to destroy these within the enemy crew’s base.
Then comes the gearing up part, the place you and your crew will head out to gather Vespa (a crystal forex 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’ll run into the enemy crew at this level.
Then comes the Shieldbreaker, a sword that’ll spawn into the map, and should be captured and carried to the enemy crew’s base to interrupt down their base’s defend, in order to start out a raid.
Once a raid has commenced, you’ve got a couple of minutes to both assault or defend turbines, with the little turbines doing round 30% harm to a base, and the massive one wiping it out solely.
Whichever base runs its well being all the way down to zero will lose the sport.
You are doubtless considering that that is fairly a sophisticated construction for a multiplayer recreation, and in some methods, you’d be proper. It takes a number of matches to essentially get into the swing of issues with Highguard, and when you do, it’s full of lots of highs and its justifiable share of lows.
Highguard feels nice to play on PS5. You can really feel the pedigree slightly below the floor of all of it, with weighty weapons, good animations, and easy traversal. Along with the myriad skills out there by the eight Warden characters, skirmishes really feel tactile and generally is a lot of enjoyable.
The again-and-forth construction of matches additionally ends in 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 the direction of the enemy base atop horseback with the shieldbreaker in hand.
In that manner, it seems like Highguard is catering to the likes of Valorant gamers – individuals who love tactical crew-based mostly shooters. If that’s you and all of the items fall into place, there’s a lot enjoyable available right here.
However, as a result of it’s a recreation that requires excessive ranges of crew play, it may be a nightmare if you happen to’re enjoying with randoms. Everyone actually must have a way of the sport’s construction to work effectively 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 a number of 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 boring, as you smash crystals and open containers which might be tons of of metres aside. And if we run into one other participant at this stage, most of the time we simply run away. There’s no 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’re capable of infuse partitions with iron, which suggests they can not simply be destroyed by an axe. But each participant is provided with a raid software, which might then simply destroy fortified partitions anyway. And that is on high of Wardens that may both bypass or destroy partitions with their very own skills. It feels just a little pointless.
We additionally get the sense that the sport is not fairly positive the place it needs to lean visually. The base map designs and character fashions really feel quite cookie-cutter, with a mash of weapons in a excessive-fantasy setting. But then skins can be found by the shop that vary from Roman troopers to Dune-inspired outfits.
There are three varieties of forex — one of which is the premium paid forex — however we by no means acquired the urge to grind the sport so we may purchase extra skins, nor did we get that “one more round” sensation, which is essential to the multiplayer shooter.
We performed the sport on the PS5 Pro, though it needs to be famous that there’s not but a Pro Enhanced model. Regardless, we discovered the sport runs quite easily, and it seems to be fairly sharp. There aren’t any efficiency choices, however fortunately, an FOV slider was added to consoles publish-launch.
Sadly, DualSense assist 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. As it stands as we speak, this can be 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. But 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.
