Alright I’m back and there’s an elephant to talk about in the room.
Highguard is a new competitive PvP shooter released Monday, January 26th of 2026 and only announced about 2 months earlier at The Game Awards. According to information gathered, it was given the prestigious slot of last announced game by Geoff Keighley for free because of how much of a fan he was of it. Advertised originally as a game made by former devs of Apex and Titanfall, the game showed promise in precision gunplay but lacked the movement people loved from Respawn Entertainment.
It also is a hero shooter. People were skeptical quickly.
Complete media silence and almost nobody able to report having played the game other than Keighley brought so much scrutiny and unwanted attention as everyone tried to understand just what it was. It didn’t feel like a genius marketing scheme to get people theorizing—what it felt like was a strange game with no proof it even existed, especially with such a close release date. It isn’t the first time something has had people raising eyebrows—in 2024, The Game Awards had the pleasure of revealing and showing off the first look of Catly.
Do you remember Catly? I remember Catly.
Regardless, Highguard actually did come out as scheduled and the reviews are…not great. As of writing, Highguard reviews sit around 44% on Steam and were as low as 24% when released. People scrutinized the game’s optimization, slow pace, and art style. The game fell out of public consciousness, a fate almost worse than Concord as I find that nobody even talks about it. It was given updates to its format and performance, but first impressions and its requirement for secure boot have it sat far away from the lofty ambitions of Geoff Keighley.
So what happened? Apart from, well, everything?
You know me—I like to talk more about games in a more critical lens. The thing that currently separates human content from AI is the depth and opinions we can grant, so let me go a bit into what I think could have also been attributed to some of the issues. A lot of people like to call the “hero shooter” genre oversaturated, but hero shooter is as much of a genre of game as “character creator” is (this is, however, an important note because hero shooter games are ones that a lot of people tend to avoid). The niche that Highguard fits within is actually rather unique—the game plays as a base defense fit into phases that focuses on objectives over kills. The most similar you can get to this in modern gaming (if you can call it that) is Minecraft Bedwars, something familiar to I think only children and silly whimsical idiots like myself. The form of gameplay leaves way to longer respawns so that progress fighting in an enemy spawn can be made (something attributing to the slow pace people discussed) and complexity that makes team games feel frustrating alone. When I finished my first session, I said “this game is a fun 3 stack game I will never get 2 friends for”
I have yet to play with friends. I was right.
So, as the curtains close abruptly on a game with such promise from, well, basically only one person, we’re left with a lot of pieces in what currently causes games to fail. I attribute the hero shooter genre and the slow pace to some of the reasons the game has failed—the initial presentation as a hero shooter didn’t help expand any hype and the slower pace of play makes most other shooter players snooze. This is, however, in spite of the general shooter population loving the battle royale genre of running around doing nothing for up to 20 minutes so I truly don’t understand market research at this rate.
Ok maybe I’m just hateful.
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