Monday, January 26th 2026 Highguard Off to Rough Start with 'Mostly Negative' Review Rating Despite High Player Counts by Cpt.Jank Today, 18:31 Discuss (0 ) 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 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. Sources: Steam, SteamDB, r/PS5 on Reddit Related News Tags: action Arena content Game Gaming Highguard Launch Mining MOBA Performance Player count PS5 PvP Release Date Shooter Steam Xbox Dec 18th 2025 Half-Life 3 May Launch Alongside Steam Machine in Early 2026 (78) Oct 3rd 2025 AMD Gains CPU Share as Intel Hits Record Low on Steam September Hardware Survey (94) Jan 15th 2026 Poor Monster Hunter Wilds Performance Chalked Up to Aggressive DLC Checks (18) Oct 25th 2025 Battlefield: RedSec Revealed As Free-To-Play BF6 Battle Royale Mode Coming on October 28 (14) Dec 18th 2025 Splitgate: Arena Reloaded Emerges as Reworked Splitgate 2 After Disastrous May Launch (5) Dec 29th 2025 RAM Crisis May Result in Next-Gen Console Delay (22) Nov 22nd 2025 Xbox Full Screen Experience Comes to Every Windows PC (74) Dec 10th 2025 Microsoft Promises More Performant Windows 11 Optimized for Gaming (93) Nov 24th 2025 Valve Will Set Steam Machine Price Like a Regular Gaming PC (97) Oct 31st 2025 Arc Raiders Roadmap Reveals Ambitious Content Plans for 2025 (19) Add your own on Highguard Off to Rough Start with 'Mostly Negative' Review Rating Despite High Player Counts There are no yet.
