Highguard may have one of the strangest releases in modern gaming. We’ll forgive you if you’ve never heard of this new, free-to-play PvP shooter that just launched this week. It had little to no marketing, fanfare, or lead-up to launch other than an oddly high-profile trailer reveal as the climactic end to The Game Awards 2025 last month. Which may have actually backfired, though Wildlight Entertainment apparently had no say where the trailer would appear.
A free PvP game lives and dies by word of mouth and hype, but Wildlight Entertainment seeminly ignored all that, coasting on that one cool gameplay trailer of fantasy battles with guns and spells and bear-mounts.
The result, is, well, not great, but at least not Concord-levels abysmal. Highguard launched on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S, though only the Steam numbers are public.
On Steam, almost 100,000 players jumped on board in the first 24-hours. That sounds big, but similar genre competitors such as Apex Legends and Marvel Rivals launched with over 650k players.
What’s even worse, user reviews on Steam are sitting at an eyebrow-raising 33%, or Mostly Negative.
Ouch.
Players are complaining that player teams are too low (3v3) and maps are too large; the lack of basic multiplayer functionality such as match history, profiles, or spectating; the bare-bones tutorial, and the overall blandness of the lore and gameplay.
I haven’t played it, but it sounds like if Apex Legends was reduced down to 3v3 battles over a single area. Which sounds fine conceptually, but this is a notoriously challenging genre for what works and what doesn’t. And that’s assuming you have good visuals and character design, solid shooting, no matchmaking issues, and palatable monetization.
Although it only includes a handful of truly big games, the hero shooter genre has grown quite crowded, and it’s more difficult than ever to break in. Just ask 2024’s Concord, which famously never really left the starting gate. Modern developers learned the hard way that this genre simply must be free-to-play to even stand a chance.
Highguard is rated T for Teen.
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