Lots of games offer intense, competitive, squad-based action, but I can’t think of any besides Highguard where I can sling spells and bullets from the back of a majestic, galloping bear as I charge in to destroy an enemy fortress.

Highguard turned a lot of heads with its flashy reveal at the end of the Game Awards last month, but many were left wanting to know more about this mysterious debut from Wildlight Entertainment, a new studio of Apex Legends, Titanfall, and Call of Duty veterans. The developers are first to admit that the intervening month has been quiet, but are confident that the game they’ve toiled over in secret for four years will speak for itself on release today.

I spent a whole day playing the game and interviewing its lead developers and studio founders last week, and I am here to tell you exactly what we’re all about to play with Highguard.

Ready to Raid

As a “PvP raid shooter,” Highguard is built around a new and interesting gameplay loop in which two teams of three players fortify bases, ride out on mounts to gather resources and gain power, and initiate a series of raids to try and destroy the opposing team’s base first. It’s a little bit MOBA, a little bit survival shooter, and a little bit Capture the Flag, among other influences.

Game Director and studio Co-Founder Chad Grenier tells me that the mode’s genesis came from team members enjoying the thrill of raiding an enemy base in multiplayer survival classic Rust, and wanting to distill that into a refined, competitive, repeatable experience. “Every match is about escalation: fortifying, venturing out, clashing, then mounting coordinated raids and defenses until only one base is left standing.”

Each round starts with a minute locked in your base to selectively fortify walls, before being cut loose to find better gear and harvest crystals that can be turned in at shops all over the map to also change and upgrade your kit. The maps are wide open, and I very rarely ran into members of the other team until after several minutes into a match, when a storm would form over one of several predetermined locations, where the Shieldbreaker soon materialized. This magical sword is your key to victory—teams fight to grab it first and run it to the enemy base (“like reverse Capture the Flag,” according to Grenier) and insert it into one of several slots around their magical perimeter shield, initiating a raid.

A siege tower immediately materializes from a portal, which cracks a segment of the base’s shield for the invaders to enter, also serving as their forward base for respawns during the raid. The invading team’s objective is then to breach the base (which is full of breakable walls), plant bombs on one of three key spots, and defend them until they go off. Two of the points will do substantial damage to the base’s life total, while successfully destroying the main, centrally fortified point will take it out entirely. The match ends when only one base remains standing.

If both bases are still there when the raid ends, the match resets and another Shieldbreaker starts to form, but with new and improved gear found scattered around the map and in shops. Each of these phases is on a tight timer, on which respawns for both teams will be capped until the next phase begins, which keeps things moving. My matches ran anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes, with some of the longer ones being quite dramatically swingy.

The tempo variation between the phases and escalating power over the course of the match gave it a distinct and pleasant rhythmic cycle of rising anticipation in preparation leading into tense raids with higher and higher stakes. Lead Designer Mohammad Alavi says that this was deliberately tuned to make it enjoyably sustainable, where the same number of hours of nonstop PvP deathmatch would be more exhausting for most players.

Need for Steed

Most of Wildlight’s creative leadership and design team worked on Apex Legends, and it shows in how buttery smooth the action feels.

There are 10 weapons available at launch, all of which will feel familiar to a seasoned FPS player. With slots for two at a time, I tended to use the Ranger sniper rifle and Paladin automatic shotgun to cover long- and close-range engagements, as matches would inevitably include both. You also have one of three raid tools (a rocket launcher, an explosive sledgehammer, or a zipline gun), which provide limited-use tactical utility or base destruction. Everything looks and sounds as good as you would expect from so many genre veterans, and the difference in approach between each piece of the arsenal is immediately noticeable.

Respawn games are also famous for their movement tech, and Highguard carries that legacy confidently. In addition to the expected running, jumping, sliding, and mantling, the big new mobility addition is mounts, which you can summon and dismiss at will in most parts of the map. There were horses, bears, panthers, and gryphons available to choose from, though the differences are cosmetic. I rode a large, brown bear clad in bone armor, and I loved my chonky, beautiful son.

Mounts are a necessity for covering the maps’ huge distances efficiently, and also lend themselves to fun gameplay moments that I’ve never experienced in a shooter before, like being able to mount up and dramatically gallop off to head the enemy off at the pass as I see the Shieldbreaker icon on the minimap moving up towards our base.

Choices, Choices

Adding to the sense of flexibility and choice, players also choose to play as one of eight Wardens available at launch, with more coming later. They are unique characters, limited to one per team, each with a passive ability, a tactical ability on cooldown, and an ultimate that slowly charges up. The two I ended up spending the most time with both had powerful area denial abilities.

Atticus is a proud, armored warrior that throws lightning spears as his tactical ability, which spark damage to nearby enemies like a Tesla coil until destroyed. When covering an imminently forming Shieldbreaker or a ticking-down bomb, I liked throwing these in corners or above doorways at strategic choke points, peppering the enemy team with additional damage as they tried to come in.

Una, on the other hand, is a masked shaman who summons adorable little nature spirit buddies (not unlike like Zelda’s Koroks), which throw stunning grenades to pester passing enemies as well as occasionally popping up to give her loot. Her ultimate summons a huge tree spirit that can really lock down an important spot in a crucial moment. Both characters reminded me of how much I enjoy playing as Symmetra and Torbjörn in Overwatch, finding the trickiest and most obnoxious spots possible to stick their turrets. Kai was perhaps the character I saw the most in my matches, a monk fused with a frost demon that summons a big wall of ice as his tactical ability, which proved clutch time and again for controlling space.

The bases themselves are also a sort of character choice, as players on each team will vote for one the six total in the game at launch, which will then slot into any of the maps. The bases have distinct advantages and vulnerabilities that interact with the Wardens’ abilities in all sorts of interesting ways. For instance, Hellmouth is a fortress suspended over a lava chasm with narrow bridges that are perfect for shutting down with Kai’s wall.

The Wardens, bases, weapons, and items in the game at launch already provide a fun and wide range of possibilities to explore in how they can remix to synergize or counter one another, giving a lot of dimensions around which the gameplay meta can evolve. Moreover, Wildlight already has a robust plan in place for infusing the game with a generous, steady drip of new content in all of those areas and more.

Eyes on the Horizon

Highguard’s live service additions will come in the form of two-month chapters, divided into two halves. That means that every single month they intend to release some combination of new Wardens, bases, maps, weapons, raid tools, and more. The first update, coming in just a few weeks, will introduce ranked play, and Grenier tells me they have lots of alternate gameplay modes in the works that will cycle in and out – such as Mario Kart-inspired mounted racing. All gameplay content will be added for free, with monetized elements strictly cosmetic.

That’s an ambitious plan, but one for which this team is extremely well prepared. Wildlight CEO and Co-Founder Dusty Welch tells me that, while the Respawn team were very happy with the initial launch of Apex Legends (which arrived as a total surprise), they hadn’t started to plot out any post-release content until after it had come out, leaving months of lag time before they could release anything new. Wildlight and Highguard were conceived with this hard-earned experience in mind to be oriented around live-service production from the very beginning.

“Starting this company, Chad [Grenier] and I knew we have to think about building it differently,” Welch told me, “and the people we hire, the mindset that we have, the pipelines that we set up, the tools, the technologies, the external partnerships and relationships, so that we’re thinking from day one how to successfully operate a live service and have an ongoing, meaningful dialog with our player base, and constantly be delighting and surprising them with content. We didn’t do that well with Apex at launch, and we are extremely well-prepared as we sit here today.”

That whole year of new content for Highguard is already deep into development. Both Welch and Alavi gave the same sly look and non-answer when asked about their favorite Wardens to play, since they’re not in the game yet at launch (Welch confirmed it’s the same one). The standards and expectations for live-service games are higher than ever, but this team comprises people who have been doing it for a very long time already, and they’ve come about as correct as any studio I’ve yet seen chase this model.

Highguard surprised and impressed me. I’m not great at fast, competitive shooters as a baseline, but its vibrant aesthetics and thoughtful design have absolutely piqued my interest. The market for live-service shooters is crowded, but Highguard has the advantage of offering an interesting new gameplay mode that doesn’t map onto any of the existing genres like battle royale or extraction. This may be Wildlight’s first game, but that belies a deeply confident and passionate team at the top of their form, excited to make the best game they can without the constraints of a major publisher.

You don’t have to take my word for it: try Highguard today for free, available on Xbox Series X|S.

The long-running Resident Evil series contains multitudes. At times it’s been about quiet menace, carefully weighing when to use each of the handful of bullets in your pocket as you try to explore and solve puzzles while avoiding terrifying and often unkillable monsters. At other times it’s been about kicking ass, tearing through hordes of zombies with grenades and shotguns. Resident Evil Requiem, the ninth mainline entry, dares to ask: why not both?

Requiem pulls off this feat of being two games in one with dual protagonists: series newcomer FBI analyst Grace Ashcroft for the classic survival horror and recurring lead and one-man army Leon Kennedy for the action. I recently played a demo that gave me a taste of both — three hours from the beginning of the game, with a lengthy Grace section bookended by bursts of Leon-fueled frenzy.

By default, you play in a first-person perspective with Grace and third-person with Leon. This nicely reflects the different levels of situational awareness between a timid desk analyst and a battle-hardened field operative, and helps Grace’s sections feel appropriately scarier, but you are free to toggle the perspective for either character at any time from the menu, which is a nice accessibility touch (and, again, a way for Resident Evil’s developers to play with the series’ history of switching between the two).

Both characters show up in Raccoon City’s creepy old hospital on their respective investigations and briefly meet before being separated in different parts of the building to continue alone.

Grace Under Pressure

Suffice it to say: Grace Ashcroft is having a really bad time.

Amid all the horrors on show, the thing that stood out to me the most about my time as Grace was her ragged breathing. More a proxy for the player than a power fantasy, Grace is terrified to be in the hospital, and not qualified for this. Even in her default first-person, Grace’s timid character is present at all times through her panicked breathing and muttering.

In classic Resident Evil fashion, my time with Grace was spent searching through different wings of the hospital to solve puzzles and collect sun, moon, and star keys in order to unlock the main door out. Healing herbs, bullets, and limited-use melee weapons (as well as inventory slots) were all scarce, so I had to be mindful of when I used them, lest I end up in a bind with no options. She eventually unlocked crafting, allowing me to be even more strategic with my finite resources.

The zombies shambling the halls weren’t fully mindless, with their locations and actions showing that they still retained some imprint of their former lives, performing a hollow pantomime of their duties as doctors, nurses, janitors, etc. Some of them seemed sensitive to light, creating an opportunity for me to turn on a nearby light switch to draw one out of a narrow hallway he’d been blocking to turn it off, allowing me to sneak by.

There was also a hulking chef lumbering through the kitchen and surrounding hallways, looking for meat. At worst, bullets seemed to just annoy him, so the only real thing to do was stay out of his way. Unlike previous games with unkillable threats like Mr. X or Nemesis being more omnipresent throughout the game, Requiem seems to have a variety of more localized horrors. I first encountered — and had to sneak past — the chef in his own kitchen, and once I’d advanced further and opened a nearby shortcut, he was roaming a wider radius, but I never found him outside the general vicinity of where he started.

My colleague Joe described a different, nurse-like monster in Summer Game Fest demo of another section that I never saw, and then across the lobby in the medical wing I encountered yet another unkillable threat: a monstrously fat zombie with the proportions of a giant baby that jump-scared me by obliterating a door frame right next to me as I picked up a key item before crawling after me, smashing through the building around it and cussing up a storm about how hungry it is. It fully took up whatever hallway it was in, forcing me to reroute around it as I continued to navigate that wing.

In my time with Grace, the point was made very clear: approach all of this with caution, because brains will trump your limited brawn. The instances when I tried to brute force my way through a problem in this section — just shooting or shoving my way past everyone — were when my efforts were most frustrated. It rewarded observation and punished impatience.

Leon, the Professional

Leon, on the other hand, is here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, etc.

Resident Evil’s resident himbo is back, and where Grace spends her time in frightened lurking, he’s all roundhouse kicks and quips. “I think I want a second opinion,” he says dryly after slaughtering a room full of zombie medical staff that swarm him at the start of my session. As if to emphasize the over-the-top tone, the doctor had a chainsaw for some reason, which I naturally took and turned on them.

Leon’s sections feature way more enemies, because he’s way more capable of handling them. In addition to more plentiful guns, bullets and powerful kicks, Leon has a hatchet that, unlike Grace’s breakable knives, only dulls with use, and he can resharpen it at any time. When exploring areas that I’d already been through as Grace, I could use that hatchet to pry open cabinets, which typically seemed to be stuffed with ammo.

Beyond just reframing previous areas by returning as Leon, what’s unkillable by Grace isn’t necessarily beyond Leon’s capabilities. “Sorry, but I’m not on the menu,” he smugly told one previously impervious hungry monster, after blasting it to death with a shotgun. It’s a common trope to encounter a boss earlier on in a game and be unable to defeat them, but here it’s nicely used to contrast the characters’ capabilities, giving a sense of cathartic revenge to Leon bullying something that had seemed so impossibly dangerous to Grace.

Leon’s sections were charmingly big, loud, and dumb, and a relieving change of pace from my tense exploration as Grace. The balance between two distinct tones and modes of play worked well in the limited context of the demo, each enhancing the other by contrast, and I’m excited to see how it pans out over the whole game. The Resident Evil series has ranged widely over the last 30 years, and Requiem’s developers have managed the impressive feat of a sequel that embraces all of it.

Resident Evil Requiem shambles onto Xbox Series X|S and Xbox on PC on February 27.

Resident Evil Requiem Deluxe Edition

CAPCOM CO., LTD.

☆☆☆☆☆
187

★★★★★

$79.99

Pre-order

Pre-order bonus:
– Grace’s Costume: Apocalypse

– This content may be made available at a later date.
– This costume will change Grace’s appearance only.

Resident Evil Requiem Deluxe Edition. Includes the full game and the Deluxe Kit. A must have for true survivors.

The Deluxe Kit contains the following content:
– Grace’s Costume: Dimitrescu
– Grace’s Costume: Film Noir
– Leon’s Costume: RE4
– Leon’s Costume: Apocalypse
– Leon’s Costume: Film Noir
– Screen Filter: Apocalypse
– Screen Filter: Film Noir
– Four weapon skins including S&S M232 Weapon Skin: Apocalypse
– Mr. Raccoon Charm
– DSO Emblem Charm
– Audio Pack: Raccoon City Classic
– Files: Letters from 1998

A new era of survival horror arrives with Resident Evil Requiem, the latest and most immersive entry yet in the iconic Resident Evil series. Experience terrifying survival horror with FBI analyst Grace Ashcroft, and dive into pulse-pounding action with legendary agent Leon S. Kennedy. Both of their journeys and unique gameplay styles intertwine into a heart-stopping, emotional experience that will chill you to your core.

*The items in this set can be purchased individually. Please be careful not to purchase the same item twice.

Resident Evil Requiem

CAPCOM CO., LTD.

☆☆☆☆☆
190

★★★★★

$69.99

Pre-order

Pre-order bonus:
– Grace’s Costume: Apocalypse

– This content may be made available at a later date.
– This costume will change Grace’s appearance only.

A new era of survival horror arrives with Resident Evil Requiem, the latest and most immersive entry yet in the iconic Resident Evil series. Experience terrifying survival horror with FBI analyst Grace Ashcroft, and dive into pulse-pounding action with legendary agent Leon S. Kennedy. Both of their journeys and unique gameplay styles intertwine into a heart-stopping, emotional experience that will chill you to your core.

*There are other bundles that include this product. Please be careful of duplicate purchases.