Highguard review in progress – Rainbow Six Siege on horseback

The creators of Apex Legends and Titanfall have delivered another slick shooter which looks set to defy expectations, but will it last beyond the honeymoon period? 

If you caught The Game Awards in December you’ll already know what Highguard is, when it was the unexpected mic drop reveal at the end of the show. There’s a deeper story as to why it was the last game to be shown but ultimately it seems as if that seemingly prime slot created more adverse publicity than positive word of mouth.

The reveal trailer has amassed over 17,000 dislikes on YouTube, with many in the comments predicting it will be an inevitable failure comparable to Concord. However, that doesn’t seem to be based on anything other than they were hoping for something more recognisable to finish out the show. Having now played the game, we can confirm it is no Concord.

The new free-to-play shooter is from many of the team behind Apex Legends and they’ve already got a full year of DLC in development, with new ‘episodes’ of content promised roughly every two months. Whether it can retain interest in an oversaturated market remains to be seen but in terms of gameplay this is a polished, accomplished shooter with some unique highs. 

Based on the trailer, you might reductively peg Highguard as Overwatch with horses. In reality, it’s a more compelling hybrid – and not just because there’s rideable panthers and bears too. Wildlight describes it as a ‘raid shooter’, which might bring to mind Destiny 2, but the term is a separate catch-all phrase to encompass the three-part structure of each match. 

In the 3v3 raid matches (the only mode available at launch), your team is deployed at a base of your choice, across one of the sizable maps. In the first phase, you have a minute to reinforce walls to best fortify three generators at your base. These upgraded walls are still destructible, like other surfaces at your headquarters, but they require powerful tools beyond your standard axe and guns in order to crack – like rocket launchers or blast hammers – which otherwise have limited uses. 

There are various ways you can win in Highguard, with each base having 100 points in health, but the core aim is to destroy the opposing team’s generators to take out the enemy’s quarters. If you take down two of these generators, labelled ‘A’ and ‘B’, by planting and defending a bomb until it detonates, you’ll win. Alternatively, take out the other, bigger generator, which has a longer detonation time, and you’ll win instantly. 

In a smart move, the odds aren’t entirely against you if the opposing team gets a crack at your base. If you successfully defend without letting the opposing team win within the time limit, you’ll deduct 30 health points from your opponent (the same amount the other side gets for successfully starting this third ‘Raid’ phase), so if no generators are destroyed during an attack on a base, you’ll essentially return to a level playing field when the match resets. 

The opportunity to attack enemy generators in this third phase is only available if you’re successful at the second part of a match. Once your buildings are fortified to your liking, you can mount your horse, bear, or panther and venture out into the semi large-scale map to loot for better weapons, harvest crystal materials to buy armour upgrades and other items from a shop vendor, and prepare for the conflict ahead, just like you would in battle royale titles like Apex Legends or Fortnite. 

You have a relatively short window to bolster your arsenal before a pivotal big sword, called the Shieldbreaker, appears somewhere on the map. Its placement is initially signposted by a purple swirling vortex in the sky, so you can gravitate towards the area early if you spot it, but its spawn point is explicitly shown roughly two minutes beforehand. As such, the first scuffles of each match tend to crop up once this location is revealed, as you try to lay claim to the sword which you have to carry to the enemy base in order to initiate the final ‘Raid’ assault. 

This might all sound complicated on paper, but during our all-day preview session, we quickly adapted to the game’s flow after a couple of matches. It helps that, mechanically, everything feels slick and satisfying to use. The gunplay and character-specific powers are tight, fluid and responsive, as you’d expect from the developers behind Titanfall.

Like Elden Ring, mounts quickly spawn beneath you via a double tap, so there’s no awkward dashes to find where you parked your bear. There’s even a gratifying minigame attached to the mining of crystals – like the active reload in Gears Of War – whereby clicking the stick at a specific cadence speeds up the process so your next axe swipe will destroy a crystal in one quick swoop. 

Highguard is a proud amalgamation of other shooters, with a dash of MOBAs like League Of Legends, but it’s in the second phase – a reverse spin on Capture The Flag – where it doesn’t just feel like a fantasy version of Rainbow Six Siege. It’s the only phase where mounts are used (you’re understandably forced off them in confined areas), which changes the pace during firefights and leads to some uniquely chaotic sprints across the map. 

Our favourite moments were these tense dashes with the Shieldbreaker, as our teammates galloped alongside in defence. If a team isn’t coordinated, it’s easy to steamroll towards the enemy base without a scratch, but there’s enough operating against you where you always feel threatened by what could be lurking around the corner – whether it’s the ease with which your mount can be destroyed (it’s tied to a cooldown meter), the long respawn times which send you back to your base, or the giant aura floating around your character when you’re carrying the sword, signalling your whereabouts. 

It’s during these sprints where Highguard’s blend of elements – the mount-based combat, the character powers ranging from lightning spears to beast-like transformations, and the scramble for gear – coalesces into something genuinely unique.

Thanks to a powerful shotgun we discovered, we were able to overturn the odds against a sniper who shot down our bear steed, leading to an uphill scramble on foot with the Shieldbreaker, as one of our teammates erected ice walls to block enemy gunfire from the rear. 

These moments aside, actually planting the Shieldbreaker leads to one of the biggest endorphin rushes we’ve experienced in a shooter in some time. You dramatically lock in the sword, turn it, and slice a beam of light behind you, cracking open a portal to allow a giant Siege Tower, complete with a panther-faced battering ram, to thunder through the enemy base’s shield.

Like summoning a titan in Titanfall, it’s the high you’ll be chasing every time you play Highguard and, spiritually, it brought to mind the battle of Helm’s Deep in The Lord Of The Rings. If you’re prone to beating your chest and roaring like Gimli, this is the euphoric sequence to trigger it. 

Highguard is consistently fun to play, so it’s a shame how visually forgettable the presentation is. The aesthetic melds medieval fantasy with whiffs of steampunk, and while it’s polished and readable during standoffs, we had a difficult time remembering anything distinctive about the different bases or maps even just a few hours later.

This carries over to the generic character designs, with the fire-wielding Slade being the only one who stuck in our memory, and that was because he looks like a Poundland version of Street Fighter’s Ken who got lost along the way. 

With a strong gameplay loop, it’s hard to tell if the lack of visual flair will have a major detrimental effect on Highguard. The developers are being more generous than most in the live service realm, with promises that all future maps, bases, characters, and modes will be entirely free.

That means all the financial juice will primarily come from cosmetics, and while we can see the appeal of buying new mounts (there was a Griffin-like bird in one bundle), none of the character skins we saw looked particularly enticing. 

There are wrinkles, albeit fixable, in the balance department too. In the version we played, the need to stack up on armour far outweighed anything else, because they affect the time-to-kill in such a significant way. This occasionally led to confused moments where other players can feel like impenetrable damage sponges, and with no way to tell how stacked an opponent’s armour is, you can blindly walk into a gunfight you’re clearly not prepared for. 

We played Highguard in the best setting possible, in a room alongside fellow press squad-mates with everyone yelling in earshot. We think it will be enjoyable beyond these parameters, though, and will surprise those expecting another run-of-the-mill shooter, but the lingering thought following our session was whether there’s enough hooks to sustain daily, or even weekly, play sessions once the novelty has worn off.

We’ll know the answer in the coming weeks, but for now, this shooter’s unique assembly of familiar components strikes a promising first impression.

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