Highguard made a bewildering debut at The Game Awards in December, with a brief trailer that didn’t really make a compelling argument for how the FPS would be distinct from its competitors. Amid endless live service deaths over the past few years, the gaming world mostly seemed to discuss Highguard as if its failure was already assured – and the early Steam reviews suggest that something of a self-fulfilling prophecy is underway.
As I write this just a few hours after launch, there are well over 9,000 Highguard reviews on Steam, and just 20% of them are positive, marking the response as “Mostly Negative.” That number will likely shift in the days to come, but that score is currently among the worst ratings applied to any game on Steam. It also launched to a peak of 97,249 concurrent Steam players, as SteamDB shows, which puts it among the daily peaks of titles like Valve’s own Deadlock.
I’ve got no idea if Highguard is good or not – and as somebody who absolutely Does Not Get competitive shooters, I likely never will. And I’ve definitely played plenty of games that I quickly clocked as being terrible within minutes of putting my hands on them. But there’s a certain glee around the takedown of Highguard that I find deeply off-putting, and I hope the game itself can somehow display its merits outside the cloud of discourse that’s lingered over it since The Game Awards.
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