After its baffling reveal as the “one more thing” closer of the night at the 2025 Game Awards, Highguard and its developers entirely disappeared from the web as the discourse surrounding it grew ever more negative. The strategy was, as some theorized, to wait until launch day, go for a big reveal and take gaming by storm just like Apex Legends did in 2019. Well, launch day is here and, uh, it’s looking like that’s not gonna happen.

The embargoes have lifted, the first impressions are in, people and streamers alike have gotten to experience Highguard for themselves and the response so far has been mild to say the very least. From what I’ve been able to gather, the best that people are saying about it is that it sounds cool and that the weapons feel good to shoot, but not to the degree that they’d choose it over the likes of Valorant or Apex Legends. That’s…not good, especially when the negatives takes have a lot more to stand on.

For one thing, the game has launched with only a single mode, a handful of maps and fewer than 10 characters on the roster. It’s maps are quite large, which should be a positive, but their scale is entirely undercut by Highguard offering only 3v3 match ups. Players report having to travel a bit before finding someone to fight and that the team encounters just don’t feel good. The guns that some said felt good to shoot also have a problem in that they apparently, aren’t very cool. Rather, they’re just oddly generic considering the kind of feeling that Highguard is going for.

Beyond these and other issues players seem to have with Highguard’s structure and gameplay, the game apparently performs quite poorly even on high-end PCs. Framerate drops have been widely reported, and it doesn’t even seem to even support its higher quality graphics settings properly. In short, the game sounds like a mess, and that’s kinda crazy if you think about it. Seriously, the studio behind Highguard’s entire strategy hinged on making a fantastic first impression, yet they decided to launch it in what really looks like a content-bare and unfinished state. Make that make sense.

The response to Highguard is exactly what we all thought it was going to be too. A bunch of people popped-in to see what it was all about, got bored, left and told their friends not to bother. The game peaked at around 100k concurrent players within the first couple of hours after launch, but then steadily lost players as the day went on. Yeah, it’s not looking good so far.

(Sidenote: why would you launch something like this on a Monday afternoon by the way? Wouldn’t a Friday afternoon make more sense so that you can catch people coming off work and heading into the weekend? Player counts are everything for these sorts of games, so why wouldn’t you launch it when the most people are likely to play it?)

I should mention that I’m very biased against Highguard and games like it, so make sure you check other sources on this too. I’m not exactly happy to see the game struggle. I mean, a lot of people’s livelihoods are riding on this, so it’ll be a real shame if it flops. However, I really don’t want another ten years of AAA chasing the Live-Service-Hero-Shooter dragon. I really don’t.

I don’t want more soulless games designed to drain my wallet and time first and be fun to play second. I don’t want this era of AAA studios expecting everyone to just gobble-up whatever slop they churn out. So yeah, it’s kind of a relief to see that Highguard, an empty amalgamation of all the past decade’s live service hero shooter design trends, isn’t doing too hot.

Now, if it really was the “next generation FPS” that it’s marketing claimed it to be, then, well, I wouldn’t be able to say anything, would I? Making such a game would have required actual innovation and inspiration, which we love to see no matter which sector of the industry it comes from. But that’s not what Highguard is. Highguard is the epitome of trend-chasing releasing at a time when its particular trend is already half-way out the door. Was a lot of work put into it? Probably. But that work should have gone into something entirely new and probably would have yielded better results if it had.

Now, perhaps there’s hope for Highguard somewhere down the line. Maybe after several content infusions and a lot of reworking to the mechanics to get it feeling better to play than at least one member of its competition, maybe Highguard will find its niche. It’s just a matter if both the developers and the players are patient enough to make it happen.

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What’s your take on the Highguard situation? Do you think it can rise above the apathy or is it doomed to one day rest in the same bin of failure as most of the other live services from the past several years?

Image from the Steam page