As we said in our Highguard Hands On article: "Highguard is, in fact, real". After more than a month of silence, the fresh PvP raid shooter did indeed release on PS5 yesterday, combined with a developer showcase sharing what it's all about.
Will it still be around in a year or two, though?
That's the question posed to many live service games in this day and age, and luckily for Wildlight Entertainment, it is at least doing far, far better than Concord. While PS5 player numbers aren't shared by Sony, we can see on the PC platform Steam that it achieved 97,249 concurrent users at its launch day peak.
While there has been a player base there on release day — a lot in part to its free-to-play launch — user reviews have not been quite as positive. Currently, the PS5 version has a user rating of 3.11 out of five stars, with the ratings split almost equally between one and five stars.
Then, on Steam, over 14,000 user reviews have been "mostly negative". Criticisms include the large map sizes and the decision to go with two teams of three players, meaning there's a lot of space for not many users.
For what it's worth, we're quite a bit more positive on the experience, having played a number of matches at launch on PS5 yesterday. We questioned whether it can make it as a Game as a Service for the long-term, but said: "It looks nice, it feels nice to play, and it has some real potential for team playing strategy with an interesting and dynamic game mode."