Highguard Assessment (PS5) | Push Sq.

Have you ever ever performed a recreation that has a nugget of one thing particular in there, however simply isn’t fairly hitting the mark? That principally sums up our time with Wildlight Leisure’s Highguard.

It is a PvP raid shooter, which can sound like one thing new, however in actuality, there’s a little bit one thing of hottest shooters stuffed into this one.

There are base defensive reinforcements like Rainbow Six Siege. You have got a tiered armour and weapons looting loop, considerably akin to Fortnite (or most battle royales, for that matter). And there are even hero characters with distinctive passive, tactical and supreme expertise, similar to Apex Legends.

Does that make it spinoff? Probably not, as a result of placing all of those parts collectively does ship one thing a bit completely different, albeit one thing that received’t be for everybody. However let’s begin with what you’ll be doing in every match.

A workforce of three will begin with the power to fortify partitions of their base. Inside are two small turbines and one huge generator. It’s your job to guard these turbines whereas making an attempt to destroy these within the enemy workforce’s base.

Then comes the gearing up part, the place you and your workforce will head out to gather Vespa (a crystal forex that may be spent at a vendor), armour, and weapons. You’ll rush round atop your mount as you seek for higher gear, and you’ll run into the enemy workforce at this level.

Then comes the Shieldbreaker, a sword that’ll spawn into the map, and should be captured and carried to the enemy workforce’s base to interrupt down their base’s defend, in order to start out a raid.

As soon as a raid has commenced, you’ve a couple of minutes to both assault or defend turbines, with the little turbines doing round 30% injury to a base, and the large one wiping it out totally.

Whichever base runs its well being all the way down to zero will lose the sport.

You’re possible considering that that is fairly a sophisticated construction for a multiplayer recreation, and in some methods, you’d be proper. It takes a couple of matches to actually get into the swing of issues with Highguard, and when you do, it’s stuffed with loads of highs and its justifiable share of lows.

Highguard feels nice to play on PS5. You may really feel the pedigree just below the floor of all of it, with weighty weapons, good animations, and clean traversal. Together with the myriad talents obtainable by way of the eight Warden characters, skirmishes really feel tactile and might be a whole lot of enjoyable.

The back-and-forth construction of matches additionally ends in a very dynamic feeling multiplayer expertise. One minute you’re nervously getting in place because the enemy’s siege tower batters at your base’s partitions, the subsequent you and your squad are charging in direction of the enemy base atop horseback with the shieldbreaker in hand.

In that method, it looks like Highguard is catering to the likes of Valorant gamers – individuals who love tactical team-based shooters. If that’s you and all of the items fall into place, there’s a lot enjoyable available right here.

Nonetheless, as a result of it’s a recreation that requires excessive ranges of workforce play, it may be a nightmare should you’re enjoying with randoms. Everybody actually must have a way of the sport’s construction to work properly collectively, and with a fast time-to-kill, you’ll battle to go up in opposition to something greater than a one-on-one – a difficulty in case your teammates go walkabout.

After we’d sunk a couple of hours into the sport, we realised that it is at its greatest when it tightens issues up – so the bottom defence or attacking.

The looting up part at all times feels comparatively uninteresting, as you smash crystals and open bins which can be lots of of metres aside. And if we run into one other participant at this stage, more often than not we simply run away. There is no tactical benefit to participating in fight, as you simply respawn seconds later.

We then began to query the fortifying stage of the sport, too. You are capable of infuse partitions with iron, which suggests they cannot simply be destroyed by an axe. However each participant is provided with a raid instrument, which might then simply destroy fortified partitions anyway. And that is on prime of Wardens that may both bypass or destroy partitions with their very own talents. It feels a little bit pointless.

We additionally get the sense that the sport is not fairly positive the place it desires to lean visually. The bottom map designs and character fashions really feel slightly cookie-cutter, with a mash of weapons in a high-fantasy setting. However then skins can be found by way of the shop that vary from Roman troopers to Dune-inspired outfits.

There are three sorts of forex — one among which is the premium paid forex — however we by no means obtained the urge to grind the sport so we might purchase extra skins, nor did we get that “yet one more spherical” sensation, which is essential to the multiplayer shooter.

We performed the sport on the PS5 Professional, though it ought to be famous that there’s not but a Professional Enhanced model. Regardless, we discovered the sport runs slightly easily, and it seems fairly sharp. There are not any efficiency choices, however fortunately, an FOV slider was added to consoles post-launch.

Sadly, DualSense help is principally nonexistent, with primary rumbles accompanying gunfire, with no use of haptic suggestions or adaptive triggers.

Conclusion

Highguard has potential, but it surely’s not fairly being met but. Because it stands right now, it is a enjoyable but bloated shooter that lacks the spark you’ll discover in different video games within the style, like The Finals. It’ll play to the tactical gamers on the market, and evidently Wildlight is dedicated to enhancing the sport. However with a recreation mode that crams each kind of shooter right into a single expertise, Highguard is a jack of all trades and grasp of none.