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I like the horse in Highguard. The biggest thrills you can find in that game are on horseback—galloping across plains, jumping off slopes, and blasting foes off their own horses as you circle each other like sharks. That only happens incidentally, though.
At its heart, Highguard is a game about farming Vesper (money but blue) and loot in the open world, then overpowering the enemy team… for the first few minutes of a round, at least. Then it's about competing to grab and escort the Shieldbreaker, sort of like capture the flag. Once that's done, it's about sieging the enemy base; you plant bombs in their fortress, and they try to stop you by putting up reinforced walls, defusing the bombs, and holding out for long enough. By that point you're shuffled into a cramped base where the horse doesn't matter anymore, and you've kind of forgotten why you had one to begin with.
The sense I get is that Highguard wants to make a smoothie of the most dominant competitive games' best ingredients—the role-based teamplay and tide-turning ultimate ability spew of a MOBA, the frantic scavenging of a battle royale, the wall-breaching tactics of Rainbow Six, and so on. The end result feels a bit like a sport I’ve just invented where you hit a golf ball across a field, play a down’s worth of football wherever it lands, and then everybody starts curling.
Such wide-reaching fusion is a noble goal, and I don't dislike Highguard; cruising around its wide open maps looking for a fight is decent fun. But based on my knee-jerk impressions, the stew of styles on offer here has too many disparate flavors.
The time-to-kill feels too short for a strategic, MOBA-like exchange of abilities, but too long for dumping a magazine into someone to feel satisfying. Generous health regen and tough shields in the late-game make this problem worse, and since each character only has one non-ultimate ability, the result is fights that sometimes feel long for no reason.
Similarly, farming Vesper doesn't capture the fun of laning in a MOBA because the map is so free and open. Teams end up too far away to harass each other. It also doesn't capture the danger-filled fun of scrounging for loot in Fortnite because I know exactly how many enemies are around and have a decent idea of what equipment they could have, as well as what I'll find. I haven't noticed much room for cool surprises in the resource farming phase, so what is all the downtime for? Highguard replicates the rhythms of the games that ins
Source: PC Gamer
