After playing Deadlock's new 'Oops, All Teamfights' mode, Highguard's kitchen-sink ruleset feels overwrought

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 inspired it, but not always the appeal.

I found myself wishing that Highguard would have identified its own most fun bits rather than the fun bits of other games I can already play—riding around on the horse, fighting over the Shieldbreaker, and crashing through walls—and built its ruleset to make those things happen as often as possible (I reckon a dedicated CTF mode in Highguard would slap). The traditional MOBA is a great example of this; the fun part is getting gold for powerful items, destroying buildings and killing enemy players, and everything you do in a match of Deadlock or League of Legends funnels you organically toward those goals.

As if to deliver exactly what I'm talking about, Deadlock just patched in a new take on its formula, with an even more concentrated focus on the basic elements that make it enjoyable. Street Brawl melts Deadlock's relatively traditional MOBA ruleset down to a lean series of rapid-fire rounds. Everyone piles into one lane, the first team to take a tower wins the round, go back to base and buy some crazy items, rinse and repeat. It's like ARAM in League of Legends or Dota 2, but even better because I can drop pianos on people.

Street smarts

Street Brawl is a lot of fun because it takes the full-bodied growler of booze that is a normal length Deadlock match and swaps it for a potent shot with the same flavor. But zoom back out and the full game isn't some multi-phase genre mashup where the objective changes every few minutes. There are twists and details to unpack, but it's never distracted from the main event: farming, teamfights, and pushing.

There are other reasons Highguard isn't my new go-to competitive game. Deadlock has a more sublime vibe even in pre-alpha with unfinished art assets; "haunted New York featuring a bisexual half-snake girlfailure from New Jersey" has more draw for me than "indistinct fantasy world featuring quasi-realistic assault rifles." Deadlock's world is funny and evocative, so I want to spend time there. Highguard's world, like its ruleset, feels like an arranged marriage of elements removed from the context where they work.

I also appreciate that Deadlock's pre-alpha is devoid of monetization and player retention tactics entirely. I couldn't so much as buy a plush if I wanted to. Meanwhile, Highguard has already teed up its in-game shop, daily and weekly quests, three different currencies, a battle pass-esque system in War Chests, and a selection of cosmetic rewards split into purchasable "series" before ranked play has even been implemented. War Chests are mercifully not time-limited and this stuff is all sequestered into its own page on the main menu, but it’s another area where Highguard cribs the wrong stuff from its inspirations.

I get that live service games cost a pretty penny and Valve has plenty of pennies lying around. I also know that Valve gets early, enthusiastic buy-in from people because its past games have a lot of fans, and Deadlock has extra room to experiment and iterate because of those things. But Highguard’s elaborate rewards structure feels more carefully considered than its only mode, and I am dog-tired of seeing the cart come before the horse in games that I’m not even sure are worth the time of day yet.

The intensity of vitriol that's been directed at Highguard strikes me as disproportionate. The game isn't bad; it's fun enough. But I'm surrounded on all sides by games that feel like FOMO vampires trying to drain my every waking second; if I'm going to play one or even a few of them, I'm not going to settle for "fun enough." Highguard might appeal to me as a beer-and-pretzels FPS I can drop in and out of, but it's already got its time investment-hungry teeth bared and poised to strike—even if I were willing to get bit, I just don't have the time.