Highguard Is A Fresh Enough Combo That It Could Be The Start Of A Whole New Thing

While it is not the next game from the studio that brought us the likes of Titanfall 2 or Apex Legends, Highguard is coming from many former members of the Respawn team–developer Wildlight is about 100 employees and more than 60 worked on Titanfall 2 and/or Apex Legends. Highguard does not look anything like those games, though. The reveal trailer for Highguard saw you riding a horse, not piloting a mech, and casting fantastical magic instead of utilizing sci-fi tech. But the trailer did not do much to tell us what the game actually is. So for about two months now, I have been looking for the answer to one question: What is Highguard?

Having now finally played Highguard, I am still unsure if I can actually classify it. If put on the spot, I would probably describe Highguard as a first-person shooter that follows both the attacker-versus-defender structure of Rainbow Six Siege and the lane-focused bomb-planting format of Valorant, but within the much larger objective-focused, base-destroying scope of the space battles of Star Wars Battlefront 2. And on top of that, the game features an upgradable armament system that combines how looting works in Apex Legends with the “shopping” mechanic of Call of Duty’s Zombies mode, as well as hero-character archetypes seen in a ton of different shooters. You have played or experienced pieces of Highguard in other games, but I feel very confident in saying that you have probably not played this exact chimera of pieces before.

You remember that sensation the first time you ever played a battle royale, or looter shooter, or extraction shooter? There are pieces of those genres we can identify in many different games that came before them, but with the earliest games in each of those genres, there was this sensation of novelty and inventiveness. They could not easily fit into the established boxes of the existing genres that inspired them.

Continue Reading at GameSpot