I was hurtling across a fantasy landscape on horseback with my two companions, racing toward the enemy base with the opposing team hot on our heels, a magic sword on my back that would win us the match, and all I could think was, Hell yes, this rules. I spent the entire day gleefully queuing back into more sessions to recapture that moment.
At an event in Los Angeles, I got to play Highguard days ahead of its launch. While I walked into the preview without a clue about what the game was, 8 hours later, I was more hyped for this shooter than any I'd played since Apex Legends (2019). That's fitting, as many of the developers at Highguard are veterans of Apex studio Respawn who left to form a new company, Wildlight Entertainment, and make something completely new.
Fans may know Highguard from its reveal at The Game Awards in an admittedly confusing trailer. In several conversations during the preview, Wildlight developers acknowledged that the trailer didn't properly represent their game, but they're confident that players will change their tune once they get their hands on the game, which is available now and free to play on PS5, Xbox Series X and PC. It has full cross-play and cross-progression, too.
I'd be shocked if those developers aren't proven right. Wildlight faces a nigh-impossible task in explaining their game in a trailer. Broadly, Highguard is a multiplayer shooter that teeters on the edge of chaos but blends elements of different games into a carefully refined dish of palate-pleasing novelty. With elements of Apex Legends, Valorant, Rainbow Six: Siege and League of Legends, Highguard is an amalgam with few rivals in its lane.
As a casual shooter fan with hundreds of hours each in Destiny 2 and Apex Legends, I found Highguard's squad-based gameplay to be right up my alley. During the eight matches I played in my preview, I picked up the game pretty quickly and finished the day wanting to queue up for more.
Wildlight plans to upload dozens of videos explaining each of the game's components, from its Warden hero classes (eight at launch) to weapons to maps to bases. But it's not nearly as complicated as it sounds on paper -- all thanks to lots of design iteration as the studio spent the last four years making their inspired Frankenstein of a multiplayer game.
Each Warden has their own set of abilities. Pictured is Kai, who can make ice walls, repair broken walls by freezing them and transform into a frost giant. Wildlight Entertainment
What makes Highguard the world's first Raid Shooter
For lack of a proper multiplayer descriptor, Wildlight invented its own: Raid Shooter. This combines first-person shooting, the lane skirmishing of MOBAs and the base raiding of games like Rainbow Six: Siege.
At launch, there's only a single mode in the game, Raid, that pits a pair of three-person teams against each other. Matches in this mode last between 15 and 25 minutes (or shorter if either team steamrolls). Each match loops a set of four phases, each time-limited to keep matches flowing. Trust me, those loops will feel like second nature after a few matches.
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