Highguard, the debut free-to-play PvP "raid shooter" from Wildlight Entertainment, recently surprise launched across Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation, after much hype, owing to the new studio's veteran leadership. However, that hype was seemingly misplaced, as, despite peaking at over 95,000 concurrent players little over an hour after launch, Highguard has already earned itself a "Mostly Negative" review rating on Steam. According to SteamDB, 78.2%, or 8,383 players left negative reviews on Steam, with only 2,333 of the 10,716 total reviews praising the game. So far, the studio behind the game has not made any comments about initial performance or player sentiment, but it looks like it might be another case similar to that of Splitgate: Arena Reloaded, which is now effectively on life support, despite its predecessor's loyal player-base and a very recent launch.

Most of the criticism of the game seems to be centered around a lack of direction—the developers seemingly trying too hard to appeal to everyone instead of making a focused experience—poor map and interaction design, discordant pacing and mechanics, and lackluster performance. Some players also took issue with the fact that it was essentially a 3v3 shooter with a sizeable map and tedious mining and looting that don't seem to fit in with the game's stated goal of fast-paced gunplay. Many of these sentiments were echoed by players on r/PS5 on Reddit, where players also expressed frustration about the game's poor image quality, or "fuzziness" and with what seems like a never-ending flood of MOBAs and shooters.

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