One of the biggest surprises of The Game Awards 2025 (TGA 2025) came with its final announcement, the free-to-play hero shooter Highguard, which, unlike most other reveals at the show, wasn’t set for release later in 2026 or further into 2027, but rather just one month later. Now, the game has finally launched, and the results are grim, with plummeting player numbers and an influx of negative user reviews.
Despite being TGA 2025’s show ending game reveal, developer Wildlight went completely dark until Highguard’s release on 26 January, and to be fair, the game did enjoy a healthy surge of players upon launch, peaking at an impressive 97,249 concurrent players on Steam as per SteamDB. This wasn’t to last, however, as just one day later, these numbers would plummet by around 80 percent, with current player counts at a low of 14,545 at the time of writing.
The game’s biggest concern, however, is its user ratings, which sit at an abysmal “Mostly Negative” on Steam, with only 36 percent of its 18,734 reviews being positive. Criticism surrounding the game ranges from PC performance issues to bland game design, but mostly, players are questioning some of the decisions made by the developers.
Most of the negative feedback stems from Highguard’s 3v3 format, which didn’t fit well with its massive maps, making matches feel dragged out as players spend most of their time traversing instead of fighting. Players do have access to a variety of mounts to get around faster, but the general consensus is that it would have benefited from larger team sizes.
The core gameplay loop of Highguard consists of two teams of “Wardens”, each with their own fortress. Players need to venture through the map in search of resources to upgrade their gear in “loot phases”, eventually fighting over a “Shieldbreaker” to initiate a raid of one side’s base, with one team attacking and the other defending. After a raid ends, it’s back to looting, and this cycle repeats until one side emerges victorious.
While this concept sounds interesting on paper, many players are reporting that this loop is simply boring, citing too much downtime between raids, which is often the only interesting part of a match. It’s this lack of excitement that led to the game’s mass exodus of players since launch, with many losing interest after a few rounds.
For an online-only title built upon the dreaded live-service format, Highguard will live or die on its player count, and from the looks of things, it’s shaping up to be another Concord. Still, its free-to-play model does help to alleviate the barrier to entry, but unless Wildlight can address the issues raised by the community, things aren’t looking good for the game, and it looks like Highguard will join the laundry list of live-service multiplayer titles that were dead on arrival.
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
Si Jia
