Have you ever ever performed a sport 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 just a little one thing of hottest shooters stuffed into this one.
There are base defensive reinforcements like Rainbow Six Siege. You may 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? Probably not, as a result of placing all of those parts collectively does ship one thing a bit completely different, albeit one thing that gained’t be for everybody. However 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 huge 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 have to be captured and carried to the enemy crew’s base to interrupt down their base’s protect, in order to begin a raid.
As soon as 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 fully.
Whichever base runs its well being all the way down to zero will lose the sport.
You’re seemingly considering that that is fairly an advanced construction for a multiplayer sport, 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 stuffed with loads of highs and its fair proportion of lows.
Highguard feels nice to play on PS5. You may really feel the pedigree slightly below the floor of all of it, with weighty weapons, good animations, and clean traversal. Together with the myriad skills obtainable via the eight Warden characters, skirmishes really feel tactile and will be loads of enjoyable.
The back-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 direction of the enemy base atop horseback with the shieldbreaker in hand.
In that means, it seems 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.
Nevertheless, as a result of it’s a sport that requires excessive ranges of crew play, it may be a nightmare should you’re taking part in 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 battle 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 boring, as you smash crystals and open packing containers 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 participating 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 implies they can not simply be destroyed by an axe. However each participant is provided with a raid instrument, 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 just a little pointless.
We additionally get the sense that the sport is not fairly certain the place it needs to lean visually. The bottom map designs and character fashions really feel quite cookie-cutter, with a mash of weapons in a high-fantasy setting. However then skins can be found via the shop that vary from Roman troopers to Dune-inspired outfits.
There are three sorts of forex — certainly 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 “another spherical” sensation, which is essential to the multiplayer shooter.
We performed the sport on the PS5 Professional, though it must be famous that there’s not but a Professional Enhanced model. Regardless, we discovered the sport runs quite 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 assist is principally nonexistent, with primary rumbles accompanying gunfire, with no use of haptic suggestions or adaptive triggers.
Conclusion
Highguard has potential, however it’s not fairly being met but. Because it stands at the moment, 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 plainly Wildlight is dedicated to enhancing the sport. However with a sport mode that crams each sort of shooter right into a single expertise, Highguard is a jack of all trades and grasp of none.
