I saw that Gamespot dropped a hands-on preview of Highguard today. The game is sitting at Mostly Negative on Steam, and I don't personally have any interest in it, but GS were describing the game as if it's some novel new experience that has no genre. While I was listening to them describing it, a term immediately came to mind—it's an FPS MOBA. That's literally it. It's not anything new, and it doesn't have to be.
It's not even an FPS MOBA. It is an FPS Buffet but not like one of those fancy buffets that you get at Vegas or something, but like a buffet where they have those eternally sticky plastic mats by the Coke machine and the wettest macaroni and cheese you've ever seen.
It is a mix of a bunch of different concepts from FPS games of the past decade or so but none of them work together in any coherent way. You have a base where at the start you reinforce by putting crap on the walls (like Rainbow Six Siege) then you go out and loot chests to find blue and purple weapons and armor (like Fortnite or Apex) then the objective spawns and it becomes CTF until someone brings the flag to the enemy base where now it becomes a bomb planting game like CS where the attacking team has to either destroy two sites or one super special site while the defending team has to, well, defend. If defense successful, go back to the loot part and repeat.
But here's where everything else falls apart.
-It's 3v3 and the maps are
empty. There are only ever three people to shoot in the map but the map is pretty big (how else will they justify selling mounts and $22 mount skin packs) and during the loot phase you can go the entire time not seeing a single soul.
-At the start of the match you can select two weapons and a heavy weapon (for breaking walls). There's no cost to this, you just pick the weapons you like. Then in the loot phase, you are basically left up to luck to see if you get a blue or purple or orange tier of the weapon you like. Chances are you won't. This means you will have to either change your loadout based on what weapon you get in a chest or go farming for crystals.
-The crystals are because there's a shop at different points in the map. The shop sells weapon upgrades and armor. This leads to a scenario where during the loot phase it is likely better to simply farm these crystals and buy the upgraded weapons and armor you want rather than leave it up to chance. This also makes it more likely that you don't see anyone during the loot phase, thus making the early part of the game boring.
-The respawns are 17 seconds long. This is far too long especially once the actual engagements happen. These respawns are only so long because there is a system where your teammates can revive you by holding a button by your corpse to rez you and enemies can do the same and prevent you from even being rezzed. So it is quite possible that you will respawn during a base defense, die immediately, and have to wait another 17 seconds.
-Any armor you get you lose one stack of on death. This means if you get, say, purple armor and die, you go down to blue armor. If you only have, say, two stacks of blue armor, you will have no armor if you die three times. This creates a system where if you die during the defense/attack phase, it is possible that this snowballs you into being even easier to kill repeatedly and thus hastens your defeat.
-The hero abilities are so half assed that it's easy to forget you even have them. Every character has one ability, one passive, and an ult. I played as a muscular masked lady whose passive is 'spirits will bring her loot'. It happened twice in three games.
-The characters have no style. One of them just looks like reject Ken from Street Fighter and another is edgy Jack Frost from Rise of the Guardians. You could put the eight characters side by side and they would not look like they were from the same universe.
-Grenades also have a cooldown because why not, it works in Destiny.
I'm sure the game has an audience. I'm just not sure who that audience is.
