When you need a tool, you rarely use a Swiss army knife. This is an option that only makes sense when you have no other options. Have you ever tried to In fact cutting wood with the crappy and very flimsy saw blade included in a Swiss army knife or any other type of similar multi-tool? I have. It was a horrible experience and I ended up buying a saw to finish the job. It turns out that cramming multiple items into one package isn’t an effective way to create something great.
Anyway, have you all played High Guard?
Released January 26 High Guard is a (deep breathing) Free-to-play sci-fi fantasy MOBA 3v3 PVP hero shooter with base defense and raid mechanics. It was revealed for the first time during the final of the 2025 Game Rewards and received a less than stellar reaction from netizens. And since then, the conversation about High Guard was very strange and strangely aggressive. People take sides. We have to fire like mortars on social networks. This is one of the strangest reactions to a video game I’ve seen in many years.
But I’m not here to talk about that High Guardone that exists online as a battlefield of takes, opinions, videos, and rants about discourse. I am here to offer a critical look at real game. The thing people can play right now. And that High Guard is much less interesting than the conversation and the mess that surrounds it.
This is perhaps the biggest problem we face High Guard as it enters its second week, players are fleeing like a toddler spilling juice from its first big kid cup. It turns out High Guard it’s just not very interesting.
Bland and boring High Guard is such a boring game to watch. The developers at Wildlight Entertainment seem to have been unable to decide what type of game High Guard is, and the first sign of this is the way it mixes fantasy, science fiction, magic, and modern weaponry. This mix of genres and tropes can be done well, but not in High Guard; each asset and pattern has had its potential character and grain sanded down to ensure the different pieces blend together.
And they mix. Perfectly. Too perfectly. Nothing stands out. There is no charm. No weirdness. Nothing to say with people or post online. It’s the kind of game that leaves your brain as soon as you stop playing it.
I’ve played over 14 hours of gameplay across numerous matches, and I’m having trouble naming a character beyond Slade, an obnoxious blonde dude who is the closest High Guard manages to create something that has personality. Everyone is a hard man or sneaky woman with clothing and armor that looks like the kind you start an RPG with and then quickly swap out.
It’s a shame that High Guard is such a forgettable game because I think the idea of a raid shooter is a cool concept.
Let’s get ready to raid When a match starts, you start at your base, choose a hero, and set up defensive walls. Then you and your two teammates go looking for loot around the map. This mainly involves riding at full speed on your mount and opening chests. The other team does the same and you might run into them.
Eventually, a large sword begins to form in the world, and each team must access it, grab it, and take it to the enemy base to open their shield dome and attack the place. Do a good job raiding and the match is over. Fail and it all repeats, but the loot in the world gets better. Once a team successfully completes a raid, they win.
It may seem complicated compared to a lot of other shooter games on the market, and it takes some time to learn how it all works. But once I did it, I had fun with it High Guard. I always felt like my team could come back and win. We were just one impressive raid away from victory.
Quote on the back of the box:
“I think one of them is called… Val? Vai? Violet? Something like that.”
Promoter
Outdoor entertainment
Type of game
Online MOBA-style, first-person sci-fi/fantasy raid shooter, PVP only.
As
Great shooter, the mounts are cool, the raids are exciting.
I didn’t like
Performance issues, maps too big, bland aesthetics, too many ideas.
Platforms
PC, Xbox Series X/S, PS5 (played on PS5 Pro)
Plays
I played around 12 hours on PS5 Pro and around 3 hours on PC with friends and solo.
Release date
January 26, 2026
And from moment to moment, High Guard feels great and reminds me of the fluid, snappy gunplay found in Titanfall 2. This makes sense considering the studio behind it High Guard is made up of developers who worked on this game. Breaking large gems in the world between raids is also extremely satisfying. I also enjoyed setting up defenses in my base before heading out to find upgrades. And chasing someone on the back of a mount is thrilling and not an experience found in most other online shooters. Then you have each character’s unique powers and abilities, which can dramatically change a fight when you unleash a blast of fire or whip up a large wall of ice. Oh, and there’s a whole loot economy, where you have to balance buying better weapons while making sure you have enough shields to withstand future firefights. And then…
Too many moving parts Well, you see, we have reached the other major problem with High Guard: He tries to be everything.
Similar to its bland art style that feels like the developers couldn’t commit to a single idea and threw everything away instead, High Guard the gameplay is a grab bag of ideas and mechanics from other popular games. And while it would be cool if we could just put ice cream, pizza, wine, and meatloaf in a blender and blend it all together to make something even better, that’s not how the world works.
Fasting, Call of Duty-like a shooter means you die quickly. This makes going out and fighting before raids a chore. Leveling up and saving crystals means you have to spend time tracking down and breaking blue rocks, which, while satisfying to break, doesn’t make for compelling gameplay. And sure, you get money from beating other players, but endgame gear costs so much and you get so little from killing that during long matches I felt like I had to stop fighting and start mining. Raids, by far the best part of High Guardalso make mounts mostly worthless, robbing the game of one of its most interesting features. And having only three players on each side makes raids less epic and the bases you defend too large. (Although the developers are already playing with it a 5v5 modewhich might help.)
© Wildlight Entertainment In other words, each piece of High Guard often gets in the way of other rooms and can derail the entire experience.
Maybe High Guard will receive weeks and months of updates to improve some of these issues. Maybe he’ll add a 4v4 mode to make the map less empty. Perhaps the time to kill, especially at the start of matches, will be increased so that fights last longer.
But none of this can really fix High Guard. It would take a lot more work to achieve this. High Guard is a forgettable shooter that crams too much into one game and ends up being an occasionally fun but uneven mess. If nothing else, it’s a mess that most players won’t remember long after they log out.
