In Memory of Highguard
The word slop gets thrown around a lot these days. If you don’t like something, slap it onto another word as a suffix, and you have a complete opinion. Multiplayer game you’re not interested in? Friendslop. Souls-like? Soulslop. The word gets attached to specific things, too, like AI. It’s so common to pair the two, that “AI slop” is practically its own word now, and it’s being used so much it’s overshadowing regular AI. Everything is slop. This article is opinion slop. This paragraph is intro slop.
The overuse of the word slop muddies its meaning. Ironically, mud is a type of slop. It’s anything that’s slimy. Something that falls on your plate with a wet thud. Processed gruel with no real defining features, unique qualities or identifiable ingredients, other than wetness. If you combine every dish in a restaurant into one, you’ll end up with a plate of slop. Mix every color together, and instead of getting a magical rainbow, you get grayish brown slop.
Mix every mechanic from every shooter in the last ten years, and you get Highguard.
Gameplay
Highguard was a free-to-play first person shooter that released in 2026, and was shut down the same year. Its main gameplay loop was unique for a shooter. It was mostly menu-based, unlike the action-oriented gun games we know and love. You enter the menu, and you have a long list of things on offer. These range from costumes, to mounts, to little trinkets you can hang on your guns. You had to buy these with points. To get those points, you had to go to another menu and use real money to buy the points. This is where the first real challenge begins.
The points are sold in predetermined quantities. There different tiers, each offering more points than the last. The trade-off for more points is that they cost more money. These point amounts were never enough to buy the thing you wanted. If you bought a higher number of points, you’d be able to purchase your item, but you’d have some points left over which you couldn’t do anything with. It was like a kind of puzzle game. You had to carefully plan which tier you’d buy in order to purchase your items by wasting the least amount of points. You’d always have some left over, it’s part of the core design. It wasn’t about preventing that from happening, but using your skills to minimize it when it inevitably happened.
The really interesting part of the game comes from how you earn that “money” to buy the points in the first place. You, the player, needed to get something called a “job”. This wasn’t done in-game, you had to go out somewhere else to do it. These “jobs” could be anything, anywhere. You could work at a restaurant, be a security guard, become a teacher, or sit at a desk and fill out paperwork. The choices were nearly endless, but the system itself was a bit imbalanced.
Once you had your job and your money, you could buy all the points you could afford. Then, you’d-
What?
What do you mean that’s not what Highguard is about?
Okay, if you’re so smart, why don’t you tell me what Highguard is about? It’s a hero shooter? What? Where’d you get that idea? From smoking weed? Were you puffing on the ganja like Seth Rogen?
If this was a hero shooter, why did it launch with 8 heroes? Yeah, I know Team Fortress 2 only has 9 classes, but they’re different characters with unique attributes, weapons and playstyles. The 8 guys in Higuard all use the same guns. Overwatch launched with 15 heroes. Deadlock, which isn’t even technically in beta, had 19 heroes on launch, and they each have their own weapon and 4 abilities. The dudes in Highguard- sorry, the WARDENS of Highguard- have one ability and one ultimate.
Alright, bring in the Gameplay header back. I’ll go over the shooting mini-game, which is apparently the real game.
Gameplay (for real this time)
Highguard was a first person shooter. You used guns to shoot your enemies from a first person perspective, and buying cosmetics wasn’t the primary focus of the game. Each match was a “raid” where you had to destroy your opponent’s base. Each match was segmented into different phases: the setup phase, looting/gearing, capturing the shieldbreaker, then the actual siege where you invade the enemy base and try destroy their generators. Destroy two out of the three generators, and the base explodes. The match ended once a base was destroyed.
The best way to talk about this game is to go over each of its phases. Starting with the setup.
Setup Phase
You and your teammates start in a base which has three generators in it, each housed in a room. Your job here is to put reinforcements on the walls, to make them hard to breach for the attackers. Each team member had a limited number of reinforcements they could place on any destructible wall they chose. Picking the correct walls to block off was an important part of the strategy.
While you were reinforcing the base, the attackers would use little remote-controlled drones to scope out your defenses a plan an attack route. They could ping your traps and tell their squad mates what to look out for-
Oh, sorry, my mistake. That’s Rainbow Six: Siege. I got mixed up there for a bit. It’s just that Highguard starts the same way, but it’s a lot less interesting. There were a lot of walls to reinforce, but you could comfortably protect the objectives. The destruction engine wasn’t anywhere near as detailed as in Rainbow Six, so you couldn’t create holes in walls to walk around or create vantage points. The walls either existed, or they didn’t. It’s was a binary state.
There weren’t any traps to put down, either.
This phase took up the first 50 seconds of the match. Then came the looting/gearing phase.
Looting/Gearing
You and your two teammates would then run out on horses, or paid cosmetic mounts, and go look for chests with loot in them. The loot was color-coded, as was the style at the time. The better the color, the better the numbers on the item. You could find guns or armor.
That’s it. That’s the looting phase. You grabbed gear. Sometimes you could find rare stuff with slightly better numbers.
There was also a really bad system where you would mine for money to use at a shop. This is a real in-game shop that sold you guns, and you bought them with fake money. Not the real money shop which is the core focus of the game. Don’t confuse the two.
You’d get money by mining crystals that were also conveniently placed next to the chests and shop. To get the money, you would whack a crystal with an axe over and over. There was a little mini-game where you could do more damage to the crystal by timing your melee attacks. Yes, this is a lot how you would get materials in Fortnite.
This looting/gearing phase would take up around two minutes of the match.
Shieldbreaker
You can’t attack the enemy base without the Shieldbreaker, a magical sword that spawns after the looting phase. Its location is announced to the players, and both teams rush to get it. It was the first time in the match where you would encounter real combat.
Since this was a big, magical sword, you’re probably wondering if you could do anything with it. Well, you could stick it in the enemy’s base and disable their shields, starting the siege phase.
Now, on to the siege phase-
What? You want me to tell you more about the magic sword? I just told you everything about it. You couldn’t use it for anything; you couldn’t swing it, attack with it, it didn’t give you any cool buffs. In fact, it wasn’t even like a flag in a capture the flag mode where it disables your weapon and your teammates have to cover for you while you run it. It’s a thing you interact with and it disappears into your character. That’s it.
Yeah, it’s even more disappointing than you thought. Shocking, isn’t it?
The Siege Phase is up next.
Siege Phase
This phase started when the sword team put the big sword in the enemy’s base. This triggered a sequence where a giant siege engine materialized on the map and started ramming the enemy base. This would go on for around 40 seconds, while both teams sort of sit there staring at the machine as it broke the shield. The game made a lot of noise and played generic fantasy horns to make it seem epic, but it was a glorified loading screen.
After the shields fall, you can finally enter the enemy’s base, or have the enemy enter your base. Then it would turn into more of a close-range tactical affair, with tight angles and small rooms.
The attacking team would plant a bomb in one of the bomb sites, and the defenders would have to either prevent them from planting or defuse the bomb once it was placed.
The attackers could use their abilities or breaching charges to break down walls to enter the bomb rooms. The newly destroyed walls changed each bomb room significantly, creating new lines of sight and altering the pace of the match. Each round was a living, dynamic interaction between attacker and defender spoken in the medium of the map itself. There was one character, Thermite, who could blast through the once inaccessible reinforced walls with a giant- wait, sorry, I’m thinking about Rainbow Six: Siege again.
Once the siege machine destroyed the wall and you went in, the game started to make a little more sense. It was extremely generic, sure, but at least you were doing something other than looting or standing around waiting for something to happen.
Unlike Rainbow Six: Siege or Counterstrike, Highguard had respawns. Killing a defender would put them out of the game temporarily, and killing an attacker would do the same. It wasn’t a high-stakes situation where one wrong move could take out an important member of the team. It was a messy fight where someone could spawn near you.
What was more likely to happen was that the defenders would die, then respawn and die instantly all over again. They would speed run the cycle of life and rebirth, since the spawns were questionable, at best. You’d die, spawn into an enemy’s active ability, and die again. You had people spinning around the wheel of Samsara at 7,000 RPM.
The gear system rears its ugly, balding head here, too. There was armor in this game, as was tradition with all battle royales, and you lost it on death. Thing is, in other battle royales, when you die you’re either out of the match, or you respawn on the other side of a continent where you can try to scrounge some equipment.
In Highguard, you would die, lose your armor, and respawn in your base with no armor. You were double-cooked. In theory, this meant you could knock out a well-geared player and have them be less of a threat, but in practice, this was a poorly thought out mechanic that encouraged the losing team to lose even harder.
Not only were you stuck in your base dying over and over again, you were doing it in the nude.
Fear not, nudist loser. The game had a fail-safe installed to prevent one team from steamrolling the other. In theory. After around 2 minutes of sieging, the match would reset and both teams would be plucked back into their respective bases, starting the whole process over again. That meant back to the setup, the looting, the shieldbreaker and sieging. If you left the enemy’s base near death, but ran out of time at the last moment, you’d have to play another 10 or so minutes of the game just to chip away at the last bit. That is, if the enemy team didn’t swing the match back on you. Then the games would go on for more than 30 minutes.
Mechanics
Time to get into the weeds of the mechanics starting with the shooting. This is going to be very technical, so buckle up. In this game, you had guns, and you shot them at other players.
That’s it. If you want more, I could tell you more. Every gun, save for the rocket launcher, was a hit scan weapon. Point and shoot, no bullet travel time. They all had recoil, as is tradition. There were a few guns. A fully automatic AK-47, a fully automatic SMG, another fully automatic gun, a burst-fire pistol, a sniper and a shotgun. There was also a revolver somewhere. Maybe a crossbow?
It’s surprising to me that, in a world of magic and sorcery, the weapon of choice is still a regular-ass AK-47. Same goes with the other guns. They’re not magical guns, they’re the same kind of guns you see in any other game. You could go to a bass pro shop and get something similar. I’ll talk more about the guns and their aesthetics later.
The game’s movement was also incredibly bog-standard. Slow walk speed, a sprint that makes you slightly faster, and a slide. Oh boy, a slide. How exciting. Every single shooter made after 2018 needs a slide. It’s a law. What does the slide do? Nothing, really. It’s a small speed boost. Kind of like a double-sprint.
This brings me to the game’s overall momentum/velocity system. There is the faintest hint of it, but like most games, it’s a prescribed interaction and not a natural mechanic. When you’re running, you slide and your speed is transferred to the slide, which then quickly stops. You can’t transfer that velocity from the slide into something else, as you should be able to. You can’t slide then jump out of the slide to jump further at high speeds. Your speed is artificially limited.
Compare this to Deadlock’s slide. Deadlock uses real momentum calculations. If you are going fast and slide, that speed is transferred into the slide. If you keep sliding, you stop, thanks to friction. If you jump after sliding, the jump will have the velocity you had while sliding. This means you can go really fast, slide and jump and you’ll still be going really fast. The game doesn’t stop you from running like an angry hall monitor once you hit an unwritten speed limit.
This is especially infuriating, since Highguard was made by ex Titanfall developers. This was the most advertised thing about the game. The reveal trailer barely gave you any sense of what the game was about, and it contained some false advertising which I’ll get into later, but it made DAMN sure to tell you it’s from the developers of Titanfall.
You know what Titanfall has that Highguard doesn’t? Other than an active player base, fun gameplay, different game modes, a good visual identity, creative twists on the first person shooter, cool equipment, good maps, uh… what was I talking about? Oh, right. Movement. Titanfall has excellent movement, with natural momentum. Highguard didn’t. Don’t try to sell your game by naming Titanfall if your game moves like you have an anchor strapped to your waist.
The movement clashes with the game’s time-to-kill. In tactical games like Counterstrike, you move slow but you die quickly. This emphasizes taking angles and patient play. Hence the “tactical” denomination. On the other end of the spectrum, we have arena shooters, like Quake. In these, you move a lot faster, but it takes a long time to kill someone, emphasizing movement and aim.
Highguard’s approach to its tactical identity is a lot like it’s approach to everything else: half-baked. The movement suggests a tactical shooter. It’s slow, but you have to traverse a huge map full of nothing. The solution to that were the horses. Mount up and ride across the vast wasteland of a map. Then, when you’re in the siege phase, the movement makes sense since you’re fighting in small, cramped areas. It doesn’t really work for anything in between. If you get caught in a fight outside of the designated areas, meaning, the 80% of the map that’s an empty no-man’s land, you start to feel the limitations of the movement.
The game’s time-to-kill was too high for its slow movement, making gunfights turn into a slog. In extreme close-quarters situations, you could kill people quickly, but at any other range, it didn’t work.
I almost forgot this was a hero shooter. There are eight of them, and they each have one ability and an ultimate. You charge your ultimate by fighting or by getting ultimate chargers from loot. These charge your ultimate, as the name suggests. Once you have 100% charge, you can unleash a special ability. Rampart, for example, could summon a mobile minigun which-
Rampart? That’s Apex Legends. My mistake. Again. I keep mixing Highguard up with other games.
In Highguard you have someone like Slade. His ultimate is firestorm. It rains fire down in an area. That doesn’t sound too exciting. Then there’s Redmane, who could roar and destroy walls in an area. Wow. That’s really underwhelming.
The shop is a waste of time, too. You can buy high-tier weapons to guarantee a drop, or buy armor because you need it, but everything is expensive and getting any significant amount of money takes a while.
Characters
There were eight of them. EIGHT. For a hero shooter. Just eight. I know Big L said 8 is Enough, but I mean no disrespect to the late L when I say, no. Eight is not enough. Especially when they’re this bland.
We got Atticus. Man with the requisite side-shave. He throws lighting.
Condor, who constantly reveals enemies around her. Her ultimate throws out smoke grenades from Valorant, because this game doesn’t lift from enough shooters.
Kai is a guy who is made of ice, and he’s not nice. He can repair walls. With ice. Or make walls. Of Ice. Or turn into a demon. Of ice.
Mara, a woman that kinda looks like Moira from Overwatch. She also uses balls. She can shield a player. Her ultimate makes a spawn point. Riveting.
Redmane is a beastman. He can swipe and break walls. His ultimate breaks walls.
Scarlet, a girl. She throws daggers.
Una, a woman that looks like Grimstroke from Dota. I saw her in a match once, and genuinely have no idea what she does.
Then there’s Slade, who is just Ken Masters, from Street Fighter. He throws fire. His voicelines are really cool and original. Stuff like “heating up” and, “fire up!”
If I sound unenthused about the characters, it’s because I am. I don’t like any of them. The only one I kind of liked was Slade, but then again, he’s just Ken.
I thought every character was boring and/or ugly to look at. Their designs are a mashup of every modern fantasy trope combined into an incongruent mess. Their costumes are vaguely Asian-inspired, but not fully, with flowing monk robes and Redmane’s steppe nomad look. Then on top they have some weird futuristic details, like armor pieces that are too perfectly contoured, perfectly machined metal bits or overly detailed geometric pauldrons. Kai has some ports on his back that look like a Flux Capacitor. Some have pouches, vests with zippers and leather belts that look like something from a futuristic military shooter.
It’s a mess, much like the rest of the presentation.
Presentation
There are two words to describe this entire game: Inconsistent and Generic. Also “end of service”, but that’s a phrase, not two words. The design mashes a bunch of fantasy tropes together in a way that doesn’t look aesthetically cohesive or appealing. It’s such a mish-mash of every single thing that it ends up looking like nothing and everything at the same time. It’s an entire Thanksgiving dinner put in a blender, including the Pumpkin pie and the wine.
The graphics themselves are poor, on a technical level. Sure, the characters all look detailed, as is standard for this kind of thing, but you can barely see it under 60 pounds of Unreal Engine 5 slime. The game is upscaled by default, and you have to go into the config file and change a lot of parameters to turn it off. This means the game looks blurry, since it’s rendering the game at a smaller resolution, and stretching it to fit your monitor.
This is also one of the most Unreal Engine 5 games ever. Everything has that telltale plasticky look to it, like it’s molded from PVC. Things that should be rough like rock walls or floors look like they’re melting. There’s volumetric fog over everything, obnubilating the proceedings. The aforementioned DLSS makes everything blurry, there’s horrible dithering on the hair and grass. The lighting, shading and materials are all the most default-ass Unreal Engine 5 looking things I’ve seen since Evil West.
Even with the game’s many, many graphical compromises it still manages to run like garbage. A lot of people reported stuttering and framerate drops. I couldn’t get a consistent framerate. I did the most I could to get the game running okay while looking decent, and I couldn’t find a good middle ground. Not to mention the fact that, to me, the game looks like a screaming turd even on the highest settings. You still can’t get rid of the Unreal Engine stink unless you go diving into the config files, and I ain’t got time for that.
The music is also incredibly generic. Look up “10 hours of fantasy music” on YouTube and you got what this sounds like. Constant fake-epic horns and battle music. The kind of thing you hear in a trailer for a movie where two armies of CGI creatures run into each other. I’m trying to remember any song from it, but I just keep getting random drums and horns that could be from anything. I think the one I’m thinking of is from The Witcher, and I played that game over a decade ago. I just closed Highguard while taking notes, and I still couldn’t hum a song from it.
I just realized, the song I was thinking of was the menu theme from Mordhau, a game I haven’t played in 6 years. Calling this one generic is an insult. At least it has personality, with the clanging of swords making up the percussion. It’s good. Highguard doesn’t have anything nearly as good.
Was it really 3v3?
Yeah, this was a battle royale type game, with a huge map and massive, epic battles, that was played between two teams of three people. Imagine playing Apex Legends with just six people. The map wasn’t as big as the one in Apex or any other battle royale, but it was still huge. It was the kind of map suited for a Big Team Battle in Halo, with vehicles and everything, but with just six scrubs running around on horses (or your choice of cosmetic mount for a few dollars).
The trailer shows three people at a time, but it never explicitly states it’s 3v3. From watching the trailer, you could assume it’s a large-scale game with multiple squads of 3 people, like Apex Legends, a game mentioned in the trailer.
There’s a moment of outright false advertisement in the trailer. At the start you can clearly see the player shoots at four enemies in one continuous take.
The store says, down in the body of the game’s description, that you “Pick from an ever-growing roster of Wardens, and form up in teams of three “. That’s technically correct (the best kind of correct), you go out in teams of three. It’s just that the game’s advertising never explicitly states it’s TWO teams of three.
The team size was one of the many, many, many missteps that lead to this game’s cancellation in the summer of 2026. It bleeds into every other aspect of the game, and negatively affects it. The map is too big for just six people, skirmishes feel small, the fantasy of a massive siege or a “raid”, as the game calls it, sounds like it needs way more people. In fact, this is called a RAID shooter, and a raid is a term borrowed from MMOs, which means a large number of people participating in an event.
Now, I have to make something clear. Having more teams would not make the game better. The game, at its core, is a bland, mediocre shooter with too much going on. No amount of players will fix the rigid pace of the matches, the amount of downtime there is, the boring characters, the bad armor system, the underwhelming siege aspects and the lackluster destruction system. That’s not even mentioning the generic guns and the basic movement.
The bases are built for small teams, too. More than six people fighting in one of these tiny spaces would be even more of a mess than it is now.
Suggesting fixes isn’t warranted, since this game shut down.
Conclusion
That’s the most anyone will ever write about Highguard. I will admit my bias. I was incredibly disappointed with this game’s reveal at the Game Awards 2025. They saved it for last, like it was some huge thing, and sold it as “from the developers of Titanfall”. It looked extremely generic, because it was, and I admit I came into it with an extremely negative perspective, but I went into it. I tried the game. I gave it a shot. If I’m going to be a hater, I want to hate with precision. I won’t take someone else’s word for it. If I took second-hand opinions, I’d still think Bioshock is a good game.
I tried Highguard, and didn’t like it at all. At its best, when you’re fighting in the base, it’s just generic. At its worst, with its constant downtime and infuriating resets during the siege phase, it’s boring. You don’t want something to be boring. Boring is the worst thing you can be. There’s nothing in boring. The reason why people watch movies that are “so bad it’s good”, is because there’s some entertainment to get from watching a train wreck. Highguard is a train wreck, but not an interesting one. Instead of a fiery crash like Concord, this is a gas leak in the dining cart. The passengers are all dead and the train just stops slowly. It’s really sad and morbid, and you don’t have any fun watching it.
I try not to use the word slop to describe things, because it’s reductive and doesn’t reflect anything real. Slop is a thought-terminating cliché. You say something is slop, and everyone else is supposed to understand what it means, but in reality, they’re just projecting their own idea of slop onto your words. I’d rather explain why I don’t like something rather than use a pithy little slogan.
I put up that whole disclaimer, and this entire essay, to say this: I think I’ve earned the right to call Highguard slop. It’s slop. It’s a thoughtless amalgamation of every trend, gameplay mechanic, scummy business practice, and everything released in the past 15 years, all put into a corporate blender. A soul-less product churned out to maximize profits while limiting risk. It touts it’s from the developers of other, better, more successful games, but it doesn’t have any trace of their magic. This game might as well be AI-generated. It lacks the spark of divinity. This was made in a boardroom by people who don’t play games, for people who don’t play games.
The part about better, more successful games is fresh on my mind. When you play Highguard (which I don’t think anyone should), you can see bits and pieces taken from much better games. The base sieging with the destructible buildings? Rainbow Six: Siege did it way better. Comparing Siege and Highguard is like comparing a Michelin star restaurant, to a McDonald’s that kicks you in the balls instead of serving Big Macs.
It has the 3 person team of heroes thing from Apex Legends, but the guns are worse, the loot is not interesting, the characters are a lot less fun to play as, the movement is worse, the respawn mechanic is worse.
It borrows a little from Counterstrike with its tactics, bomb sites (Siege also took from Counterstrike, so you can trace the family tree back to Counterstrike) and economy, but Counterstrike is a much better game in every way, and its design decisions are coherent and make sense. In fact, I wouldn’t say Counterstrike is a better game. There isn’t a comparison. Counterstrike is a good game, while Highguard is barely a game.
It has the destructible environments and resource gathering of Fortnite, but you can’t play as Homer Simpson or Hatsune Miku. Also, the gameplay in Fortnite is better, too, but come on. What other game lets you play as a squad of Homer, Naruto and Chun Li?
What if Highguard had more teams of 3? Would that make it more exciting? No. It wouldn’t. If you want a team-based first person shooter with way better destructible environments, go play The Finals. It’s galaxies ahead of Highguard.
There are countless other games you could play that do what Highguard does better than Highguard. In fact, I’d recommend Marvel Rivals over it, and I really don’t like that game.
In short, I don’t recommend Highguard. To ANYONE. This game isn’t worth playing even to make fun of it. I regret my time with it. It’s free to play, and I still feel I’m owed a refund. If you want to laugh at it, wait for your favorite YouTuber to make a video on it. I see Dunkey released his Highguard video as I’m writing this. Watching him is more fun than playing that. I don’t mean that disrespectfully, I love Dunkey. I’m saying that you should watch him instead of playing this crap.
It’s sad when a game fails and people waste their time and work on it, but this game has to fail. The industry needs to be sent a message that we don’t want this garbage. Stop spending millions of this boring live service garbage, you apes. This game is fully released, and it still has less polish and content than Deadlock’s pre-alpha. It has just 8 playable characters, but hey at least the shop works, right? SPEND YOUR MONEY!
This game sucks, I’m glad it’s gone.
The only thing that could be worse than this would be an actual, flaming train wreck. Something like Kane and Lynch, but who would play that. Much less review it…
What actually could have saved this is NFTs
Gotta say I really enjoyed the slop-like elements of the game