i have done my dailies in highguard for the last three days. my weeklies are done as well. this game kind of pisses me off.
my thoughts are likely not all too dissimilar from what you've been reading, though i think i do actually skew slightly more positive. which baffles even myself, since this is the definitive "bunch of ideas from every recent popular shooter" game. pre-match base defense a la R6 Siege, bomb sites like counter strike, Heroes with Abilities like [fucking everything]. colour coded loot, etc etc etc. you have seen all of it before.
character designs with no internal consistency; all of them could be from a different series, and all of them are fairly generic. they all have abilities you've seen before in other Not Mobas. scout with wallhacks, assassin with stealth, support who can create respawn points, all that shit.
the base building phase goes on too long, everyone is done with about 25 seconds left every single match without fail. then you move on to the "gear up" phase, where you go out and look for your weapons and armour. you can mine Vesper (which is actually a little timed minigame I enjoy!) which you can trade for items without having to go searching. this also has the problem of Going On Too Long: the maps are far too big for a 3v3 game, which leads to this phase actually being a whole lotta nothing. you're not incentivized to go skirmish for better items, there's enough time and the maps are large enough that you Do Not Need to engage enemy players AT ALL until the next phase. even when you do, it feels like a waste of time since there's no tangible benefit.
items at the Trader are the same for both teams as far as I can tell, so you run into Everyone's Using The Same Weapons problems pretty immediately, leading to firefights feeling homogenous. which is a shame, because weapon balance is actually pretty solid! most of them feel good and the TTK is low even with full armour, which is one thing I give it over Apex. there's no tanking a thousand shots because you're stocked up on batteries with red armour. i admittedly have not played apex in ages so this may have been rectified, but i choose to believe it hasn't.
after you've wandered around for a couple minutes wondering when you'll get your sweet sweet dopamine, you move on to the actual fun parts: the battle for the Shieldbreaker and the Raid on the enemy base. now you actually have a reason to fight the enemy players, and the gunplay and movement are just good enough to make this engaging. you have to carry the Shieldbreaker right up to their gates, and they know your position the whole time you have it, so you really have to coordinate the entire way there. respawns are long enough that if you teamwipe, the enemy can make significant progress before you can challenge them again, so every engagement is real tense. once the Raid starts, it turns into CS. 3 bomb points, limited respawns for the attackers. this also runs into a bit of a problem though: one specific point just Wins You The Match, and it (usually) isn't any harder to get to than the others, though it takes slightly longer for the bomb to go off. not long enough to matter though, so most Raids just devolve into rushing that point, which seems a bit at odds with how the game presents itself. you get better loot the longer the matches go on, so a real back and forth match is how you get your big fancy weapons. it makes more sense to Win Instantly though, so a lot of games are just decided while you're running around with shit that sucks.
none of this is what pisses me off. it should! this should be the nadir of gaming, something so soulless and corporate that I turn my nose up in disgust and never spare it a second thought. what pisses me off is that some of this comes together just enough for me to want to keep tabs on it.
i can see it. i can see how with some changes, this might actually just be Fun. it could be my beer & pretzels game of choice if it was shored up a bit. less downtime, more players per team, balance changes around bomb planting and base building. maybe some PvE stuff during the gear phase. a couple new heroes with actually interesting abilities. it pisses me off because I should not be thinking about these things AT ALL. but I am.
one thing I will praise wholeheartedly though is the voice acting. i could never be a professional voice actor, because if you showed me a character like Atticus, maybe the game's most generic hero in every possible way, and told me to bring him to life, I would laugh in your fucking face.
Abubakar Salim approaches the role like a man whose life hangs in the balance. every single line delivered with the conviction of a man who truly believes what he's saying. it's fucking baffling, but most of all very impressive. his role stands out the most maybe just because of how NOTHING Atticus is, but the rest of the cast is quite good. Daisy Lightfoot as Condor and Elle Newlands as Una are particularly noteworthy imo, but nobody does a poor job here. it has the typical pregame character banter and """"""""""""LORE"""""""""""""" of games like this, but the cast does well enough that even if I do not give a single shit about WHAT they're talking about, I do enjoy hearing it.
this is far too many words for a game like this. can you see why it pisses me off? i have better things to do. actual games to finish, books to read, miniatures to build/paint and DND characters to write. instead, I'm thinking about how I wish Highguard was better. what the fuck happened? it was supposed to be a Bit on day 1. now look at me.
