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It feels anticlimactic to say so, and I don’t know why Geoff likes it so much, but Highguard seems decent. Adequate. S’alright. It’s a fine competitive FPS that’s capable of producing spirited, back-and-forth gun battles between spec ops wizards on bearback, which can in turn tickle the itches of anyone burnt out on battle royales or exasperated with extraction shooters. That’s me. I’m talking about me.
Well, the last one might have only appealed to folks open to taking on a mission that demands a bunch of crouch-walking, but you can’t say Helldivers 2‘s second warbond of 2026 isn’t offering plenty of bang for your buck. It’s got an exploding hammer. There’s other stuff in this Siege Breakers warbond too, but I’ll be honest, none of that can boast being a stick with a thing that goes boom taped to the end.
Valve’s lawyers won’t be able to file away one of the legal legalings they’ve been dealing with for a little while now, at least not yet. A tribunal have ruled that the £656m lawsuit brought against the company by digital rights campaigner Vicki Shotbolt and law firm Milberg London LLP last year – the one that could net UK dwellers who’ve bought stuff on Steam since early June 2018 up to £44 in compensation – can go ahead.
As a result, Valve’s Lionel Hutzes will have to face the lawsuit’s accusations that the company have used Steam’s “dominant position” in the PC market to behave “anti-competitively”, with the end result that regular folks are “paying too much for PC games and in-game content and have lesser PC Game platform alternatives”.
Quick confession: every time I come up with an absolute Frankenstein’s cocktail of allusion-cobbling Google-bait like the headline for this article, a fairy dies. But that’s OK, because Hell Express is a top-down 3D extraction shooter about delivering letters to the dead. When I play it – there’s no release date yet – I will convey a note of apology to the soul of the fairy I’ve just slain with my appalling SEO practices. This may be difficult, however, because many of the underworld’s denizens are hostile. The only thing you’ll be delivering to them is bullets, fire and explosives.
You’re shuffling through the desert scrub, wondering if the clawed beasts just a few yards away have spotted you yet. You’ve made sure to pop a Stealth Boy just to be extra safe, and told Raul that if his knees creak at an inopportune moment, he’s on his own. Then, you realise you brought Rex along, and he’s gotten stuck on a rock several meters behind you. Finally freeing himself, the good boy bounds towards you at full speed. This should be the point in some Fallout New Vegas stealthing that you realise it’s brown trousers time.
It isn’t, because Obsidian weren’t total sadists when they designed the thing. It does take you out of your Mojave roleplay a bit, though. Thankfully, I can report that a modder has taken it upon themselves to ensure that New Vegas now benefits from the finest in sneaking dog technology.
Reader, I am about to venture into that terrible ninth circle of videogame journalist cringe known as pitching your own game in an article. A while ago, I mused aloud on Xitter that a Batman game (or offbrand spiritual homage) from the perspective of people trying to commit petty crimes in Gotham City would be Interesting and/or Countercultural.
You could portray Batman himself as both a lone vigilante and a pervasive environmental factor – a morbid, hallucinatory tendency of the architecture itself, gradually provoked and intensified by tiny acts of larceny and vandalism. Kind of like the Eye of Sauron, but it’s the Bat Signal, and instead of fighting the urge to wear the Ring, you’re stealing candy bars and writing on toilet walls.
Sega have gotten just a little bit too good at making Sonic games. Not good as in 10/10 masterpieces, good as in competent, as in mostly jank free, and where there is jank it’s the annoying, not very funny kind. I like it when the blue hedgehog is impossible to control in Sonic Adventure 2 actually! But look, when I go on to tell you about a game that captures that same unruly spirit of Sega’s early 3D games, please ignore that Christmas was a month ago because SantaCorps 4 is a 3D platformer that really does have the messy, gloopy sauce.
It is inevitable that when a game like Balatro rocks up, is really good, and makes a gazillion dollars, that there will be the odd imitator here and there. Sincerity, flattery, yada, yada, yada, point is, it’s all fine as long as you at least put enough of a twist in there to make it more of an “influenced by” over a “wholesale ripoff” kind of thing. I think Gambonanza, a roguelike deckbuilding chess game, fits into the former quite nicely.
Good, bad, I don’t bloody know yet the thing’s only been about for five seconds, but we can certainly say one thing now: Highguard is out. Now we can sit and prepare ourselves for more inane and pointless discourse about yet another live service shooter that we’ve probably had several times before. Hooray! But before we get ahead of ourselves, a moment of reflection, courtesy of the devs behind Highguard itself, who have spoken out about all that silence following their Geoffies reveal.
Hear ye, hear ye! Embark have shared some more concrete details for Arc Raider’s next main update, Headwinds, which is set to be downloaded onto your platform of choice tomorrow, January 7th. Namely, just what that new matchmaking option is, which is, as it seems, one that won’t be for everyone.
