Highguard's Launch Paradox: Strong Player Numbers Clash With "Mostly Negative" Steam Reviews

The launch of a new free-to-play shooter from a studio of Apex Legends veterans should be a moment of triumph. For Wildlight Entertainment’s Highguard, the data tells two starkly different stories. On January 26, 2026, the "PvP raid shooter" stormed Steam with nearly 100,000 concurrent players, a clear signal of immense interest. Yet, within hours, that wave of players crashed against a wall of discontent, flooding the store page with negative reviews that quickly cemented a "Mostly Negative" rating. This launch presents a modern gaming paradox: a game that successfully captured an audience's attention but immediately failed to hold its approval. What caused this dramatic disconnect, and is there a path forward for Highguard?

The Launch: A Tale of Two Metrics

Highguard entered the arena with significant advantages. Revealed at The Game Awards just a month prior, its pedigree—a team formed from ex-Apex Legends developers—generated immediate buzz. Its free-to-play model and simultaneous multi-platform launch on Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S removed all barriers to entry. The result was a powerful debut: a peak of 97,249 concurrent players on Steam, a number many paid titles would envy.

This strong initial engagement, however, stands in brutal contrast to the community’s verdict. The Steam review page rapidly turned into a critical battleground. With over 14,500 reviews submitted, only 32% were positive, solidifying the "Mostly Negative" tag. An earlier snapshot was even more dire, showing 7,230 negative reviews out of 9,442. This immediate and overwhelming rejection from a significant portion of its PC player base created a stark launch-day narrative.

Interestingly, the reception appears less severe on consoles. The PlayStation 5 version reportedly holds a user rating of approximately 3.34 out of 5 stars, suggesting a different player experience or demographic. Nonetheless, the dominant narrative is being written on Steam, where the core issues are being dissected with fervor.

Core Gameplay Criticisms: Scale, Pace, and Depth

Beneath the surface-level technical problems, players identified fundamental design flaws that crippled the core loop.

The Map Problem

emerged as the most frequent and damning complaint. Highguard is built around a 3v3 format where teams must gather resources before assaulting an enemy vault. However, the game’s expansive map, designed for these raids, feels desolate with just six players. The result is a painfully slow pace, with players spending excessive downtime traversing empty spaces searching for opponents or resources. "You spend more time running simulator than shooting," summarizes a common sentiment, highlighting a critical mismatch between map scale and player count.

This leads directly to The Boring Loop. The initial resource-gathering phase, involving mining and looting, was intended to create tension and strategy. Instead, the community has largely panned it as a tedious chore that delays the game’s more exciting moments. When combined with the empty map, this opening act feels like a slog, testing player patience before the promised action begins.

Compounding these issues is a perception of Shallow Heroes. In an era defined by hero shooters with deep ability kits, Highguard’s characters feel underdeveloped. With only two cooldown abilities each, players report a lack of strategic depth and distinctive playstyles. This simplicity, when paired with the slow early game, makes the overall experience feel repetitive and lacking in meaningful player expression.

While these design choices formed the bedrock of player discontent, a shaky technical launch ensured that discontent would boil over.

Technical Hurdles and Additional Friction

A rocky technical launch poured fuel on the fire of gameplay discontent. Players reported widespread server instability and poor PC performance, including stuttering and optimization issues. Furthermore, the deployment of a kernel-level anti-cheat system at launch proved controversial, raising privacy concerns and causing conflicts with other software for a portion of the player base.

These core problems were amplified by secondary criticisms. Many reviews describe the gunplay as "wonky" or unsatisfying, a cardinal sin for a shooter. Others note the game’s visual presentation as bland or unremarkable, failing to create a compelling world to explore during those long traversal phases. This context is crucial: Highguard’s debut followed a brief and confusing reveal trailer and was subject to pre-launch skepticism. The actual launch, riddled with these issues, validated those early doubts for many.

Glimmers of Hope and the Path Forward

Despite the torrent of criticism, Highguard is not without its merits—elements that form a potential foundation for recovery. The raid phase itself, the concentrated combat to breach and defend the vault, is frequently cited as intense and fun. Similarly, the mount system for traversal is praised as an enjoyable mechanic, even if it exists to solve a problem of the map's excessive size.

The community has also been proactive in offering constructive solutions. The most popular suggestion is to increase team sizes to 4v4 or 5v5, a change that would instantly populate the map and address the pacing issue head-on. Other ideas involve reworking the resource phase to be more engaging or accelerating the early game.

Critically, developer Wildlight Entertainment has not gone silent. The studio has publicly outlined a roadmap for updates, with the first year of content already in development. This commitment to long-term support is a necessary first step in signaling to players that their feedback is being heard. The promise of new modes, maps, and systems is the lifeline Highguard needs.

The story of Highguard’s launch is a case study in modern live-service pitfalls. It demonstrates that a famous pedigree and strong initial curiosity are no longer enough. They are merely the opening bid. Player retention is won or lost in the first hours of gameplay, where core design and technical polish are ruthlessly judged. Highguard captivated nearly 100,000 players but failed the moment-to-moment test for a large majority of them.

Its future is now a challenging salvage operation, not a foregone conclusion. The game possesses a solid mechanical core in its raid combat and mount traversal. Wildlight’s stated roadmap provides a framework for change. The studio’s ability to rapidly and meaningfully address the central complaints—rebalancing the pace, reinventing the boring loop, and stabilizing performance—will determine everything. Highguard has stumbled at the starting line, but the race to win back player trust is just beginning. Its fate will test a central tenet of the live-service era: can a robust post-launch plan salvage a game from a damaging first impression?

Tags: Highguard, Live Service Games, Game Launch Analysis, Steam Reviews, Wildlight Entertainment