Highguard: Negative Reviews, Canceled Shadow Drop, and a Year-Long Support Plan
Highguard has been released — a free-to-play team raid shooter from the studio Wildlight Entertainment, founded by former employees of Respawn Entertainment. The project was the closing announcement of The Game Awards 2025 ceremony and immediately disappeared from the radar until launch day. However, that was enough — a crowd of gamers rushed to evaluate the game and ended up disappointed.
Silence Before Release
Why did Wildlight Entertainment choose not to invest in marketing, limiting themselves to just appearing at TGA? As explained by Jason Torfin, the studio's vice president of products and publishing, Highguard was originally meant to be released without any prior announcements — a so-called shadow drop.
Torfin stated that thanks to Wildlight's independence and measured business approach, the team has true freedom of action. The developers do not want to prioritize purely commercial success because they believe that blind chasing of it fails nine out of ten times. Thus, Highguard was planned to quietly launch with "the game speaking for itself."
However, the team changed its mind after a proposal from producer and TGA host Geoff Keighley. He liked the game so much that he wanted to announce it at his event.
The opportunity arose — and we decided: why not make a trailer that will be part of this "hidden" launch? The trailer we showed at The Game Awards was meant to be the first thing players see at release, followed by 25 minutes of additional content. The problem is, this trailer was not designed to "explain" the game from scratch. Jason Torfin
Early Reviews
Access to Highguard opened to everyone on the evening of January 26. Within an hour after launch, the peak concurrent players on Steam almost hit 100,000 but then started to decline.
There may be several reasons for this. Reviews mention that Highguard is poorly optimized, frequently running into various errors, and people experience issues logging in. Additionally, after playing a few matches, some users find that the maps are too large for the “3v3” format and admit not understanding who the game is targeting.
"Even the beta of 'Concord' launched and ran better than this [censored]," shared player Borkup54.
What is often praised is the responsive mount controls. As a result, at the time of writing, out of 19,000 reviews on Steam for Highguard, only 31% are positive (the average score on the PS Store is 3.11/5, and on the Xbox store — 2.9/5). The shooter is called boring, criticized for poor performance and blurry visuals, strange gameplay structure, and more.
"The game proudly calls itself a 'next-gen shooter,' but in reality it’s just a tasteless mashup of borrowings from other popular games," summarized user Swervey 'Ascoobis' Doo.
Wildlight thanked all the gamers who showed interest in Highguard and promised to release an update soon to fix stability issues in the client. Several more patches will come out over the week.
Future Plans
The "first episode" has already started in Highguard — that is how seasons are called here. Players have access to:
- 5 maps.
- 6 bases.
- 8 Guardians.
- 3 mounts.
- 10 guns and 3 raid tools.
You can already get a glimpse of the team’s long-term plans. The second episode will start in two weeks, but each subsequent season will last two months. However, content updates for Highguard will be released monthly.
Planned additions include new maps, bases, mounts, weapons, lootable items, and more. The roster of playable characters will expand every couple of months. A ranked mode will be introduced in February, and new game modes are scheduled for April, June, August, October, and December.
Also, Wildlight promised not to bombard players with ads or crossover skins.
"We wanted to create a store that we ourselves would like as gamers. So here there is only 'cosmetics' and only direct payments. No FOMO syndrome, no pay-to-win, no random items, paid advantages, or loot boxes," assured Jason Torfin.
On paper, the plan looks good. But only time will tell if the title can maintain a sufficient online presence to realize all of the above. The developers say that metrics like concurrent player numbers on Steam should not affect Highguard’s success.
We have a small team. And getting a six-person lobby together is not hard. What’s much more important is finding our audience — a loyal group of players who will truly enjoy our creation. That will be our growth point. Of course, being a general target and hate magnet is unpleasant. But I try not to get distracted and just make a good game, and then just let people play it. Because that’s what matters most. Mohammad Alavi, lead designer
You can play Highguard on PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series. There is no Russian localization. Recall, the title is distributed on a free-to-play basis.