League Of Valorant Paladins: 6 Siege

I mostly just feel bad for the devs. The game clearly wasn't designed or prepared for this level of scrutiny. Everything is blurry and unclear. The map is the size of Latvia but you only have 3 players so most of your time is spent running around the map looking for something to kill. It's saying it's a fast-paced shooter but also the merchant makes you go mine rare earth metals to buy stuff. The characters are profoundly bland and uninteresting and the art direction is just like they dumped every Cool Idea into a vat - what if there was magic? what if there was guns? what if you could ride a bear? what if there was Excalibur? what if there was a giant siege tower? The game isn't fun and it isn't interesting.

All that said, it is free.

If you were to toss Overwatch 2, Apex Legends, VALORANT, Rainbow 6 Siege, and any generic survival shooter into a pot, but specifically only the worst parts about them, you'd get Highguard.

Wildlight Entertainment wants you to believe this is a Genre-Defining "PvP Raid Shooter," at least in their words. In reality, I think it's a confused, identity-less amalgamation of the last decade’s most popular shooters, sewn together without understanding the soul of any of them. It is a game that answers a question nobody asked: "What if we took the most frustrating parts of Battle Royales, Tactical and Survival Shooters, and forced them into a Hero Shooter?"

You get unfettered ass, honestly speaking.


To me, it feels like this game was designed in meetings where not a single ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ soul was allowed to say "no."

It takes the ability spam of Overwatch and VALORANT, but without the polish, interactivity, and intention.

It attempts the tension of CS2 or VALORANT through its bomb defusal portion of the base raid, but completely does away with it due to its chaotic movement and utility spam.

It drags in the looting from Apex Legends, forcing you to spend the first few minutes of a match staring at the ground looking for weapons and armor instead of playing the game.

The result isn't a "best of all worlds" experience. It is an incredibly discordant mess. The looting and resource gathering truly just feels like fluff designed to pad out your playtime. The tactical segments involving defusing bombs, holding angles in tight corridors just doesn't feel right when you add in all of the janky movement the game allows you to get away with. You are constantly fighting the game's design rather than any of other sorry bastards trying this game out as well.

Are there even any positives?

I'd be outright lying if I said there weren't. Listen, the spectacle is pretty cool, especially when you summon in your raid tower through a giant glowing ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ portal. I just cannot, in good conscience, be that happy about it when the game just does not run properly no matter how much I try. And I'll get to that in a bit.

The movement allows for a lot of creativity in how you can take gunfights, and some signature abilities, specifically Scarlet, akin to Wraith from Apex Legends where you can phase out (without being invulnerable in this game) allows you to reposition and get out of tight spots and allow you to re-engage on better terms. That part I like, and even then, it's nothing I've never seen before. I understand these types of games have universal character archetypes that will show up in every hero shooter, but if that's the case, what makes this game special?

Why the hell would I play Highguard?

If I want precise, tactical gunplay, I would rather play CS2 and (unfortunately) VALORANT, at least they have that loop in spades.

If I want the fluid movement, map traversal, and the thrill of picking up loot, I could just play Apex Legends.

If I want to be methodical about how I use my utility, take advantage of the environment through clever levelution, I would just play Rainbow 6 Siege.

Okay, honestly I wouldn't play R6, but if I had a gun to my head, then yeah.

Highguard is a jack of all trades, and most certainly a master of none, in the worst possible way. It offers a diluted version of every mechanic it draws inspiration from.


This game ran horribly for me in the short while I subjected myself to this torture.

I am running this on a Ryzen 7 7800X3D paired with an RTX 5070 and 64GB of RAM. This is a machine built to chew through 4K video editing and high-refresh rate gaming without breaking a sweat. Yet, Highguard stutters, hitches, and drops frames as if it’s running on something far worse than it actually is. I'm literally seeing streamers play this game on 5090s and still struggling to maintain stable performance.

If a rig of this caliber cannot brute-force a stable experience in the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ shooting range, the game isn't just "unoptimized." To me, it's a joke. There is no excuse for a competitive shooter in 2026 to feel this sluggish on recent hardware.



In Conclusion

Highguard is a complete waste of time. My only reason for installing this was morbid curiosity. I wanted to see if the train wreck was at least spectacular to watch.

It isn't.

The worst part about Highguard isn't that it's bad. It is that it is boring. It is not "so bad it's entertaining." It is just a soulless, corporate checklist of a game that inspires absolutely nothing. It's not even bad enough for me to be entertained. I feel angry that I gave away an hour of my life that I will never get back.

To me, Highguard is a game that exists solely because "Hero Shooter" is somehow still a buzzword that people in the industry love. It has no artistic vision, no unique mechanical hook, and no soul. It's less a game, and more a product.

Do yourself a favor, use your time elsewhere, and save the drive space. Go play the games Highguard is trying to rip off, or just sit tight and wait for Deadlock. At least Valve knows that if you’re going to combine genres, you need to actually make them fit together.

Highguard is not the future of shooters. It's a reflection of the derelict state the genre is in.