Have you ever ever performed a sport 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.
This can be a PvP raid shooter, which can sound like one thing new, however in actuality, there’s slightly one thing of hottest shooters stuffed into this one.
There are base defensive reinforcements like Rainbow Six Siege. You will have 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, identical to Apex Legends.
Does that make it by-product? Probably not, as a result of placing all of those components collectively does ship one thing a bit totally different, albeit one thing that gained’t be for everybody. However let’s begin with what you’ll be doing in every match.
A staff 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 staff’s base.
Then comes the gearing up part, the place you and your staff will head out to gather Vespa (a crystal foreign money 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 may run into the enemy staff at this level.
Then comes the Shieldbreaker, a sword that’ll spawn into the map, and should be captured and carried to the enemy staff’s base to interrupt down their base’s defend, in order to begin a raid.
As soon as a raid has commenced, you’ve got 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 completely.
Whichever base runs its well being all the way down to zero will lose the sport.
You might be doubtless pondering that that is fairly an advanced construction for a multiplayer sport, and in some methods, you’d be proper. It takes a number of matches to essentially get into the swing of issues with Highguard, and when you do, it’s crammed with loads of highs and its justifiable share of lows.
Highguard feels nice to play on PS5. You may really feel the pedigree slightly below the floor of all of it, with weighty weapons, good animations, and clean traversal. Together with the myriad skills out there by way of the eight Warden characters, skirmishes really feel tactile and may be quite a lot of enjoyable.
The back-and-forth construction of matches additionally leads to a extremely 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 means, it seems 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.
Nevertheless, as a result of it’s a sport that requires excessive ranges of staff play, it may be a nightmare in the event you’re taking part in with randoms. Everybody actually must have a way of the sport’s construction to work nicely collectively, and with a fast time-to-kill, you’ll battle to go up towards something greater than a one-on-one – a difficulty in case your teammates go walkabout.
After we’d sunk a number of hours into the sport, we realised that it is at its finest when it tightens issues up – so the bottom defence or attacking.
The looting up part all the time feels comparatively uninteresting, as you smash crystals and open packing containers 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 isn’t any 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 in a position to infuse partitions with iron, which suggests they can not simply be destroyed by an axe. However each participant is provided with a raid software, 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 skills. It feels slightly pointless.
We additionally get the sense that the sport is not fairly certain the place it needs to lean visually. The bottom map designs and character fashions really feel relatively 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 foreign money — one in every of which is the premium paid foreign money — however we by no means bought 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 needs to be famous that there’s not but a Professional Enhanced model. Regardless, we discovered the sport runs relatively easily, and it seems fairly sharp. There aren’t 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, nevertheless it’s not fairly being met but. Because it stands as we speak, 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 plainly Wildlight is dedicated to enhancing the sport. However with a sport mode that crams each sort of shooter right into a single expertise, Highguard is a jack of all trades and grasp of none.
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