Hours after launch, Highguard has "Mostly Negative" reviews and a peak of 97,000 players on Steam

Highguard made a bewildering debut at The Game Awards in December, with a brief trailer that didn't really make a compelling argument for how the FPS would be distinct from its competitors. Amid endless live service deaths over the past few years, the gaming world mostly seemed to discuss Highguard as if its failure was already assured – and the early Steam reviews suggest that something of a self-fulfilling prophecy is underway.

As I write this just a few hours after launch, there are well over 9,000 Highguard reviews on Steam, and just 20% of them are positive, marking the response as "Mostly Negative." That number will likely shift in the days to come, but that score is currently among the worst ratings applied to any game on Steam. It also launched to a peak of 97,249 concurrent Steam players, as SteamDB shows, which puts it among the daily peaks of titles like Valve's own Deadlock.

Many of those negative reviews complain of typical launch day woes, like server instability, poor performance on certain systems, or its use of the controversial kernel-level anti-cheat that underlies many modern multiplayer titles. Other poor reviews are memes. There seems to be some sentiment going around that it's "woke" for reasons I find even more difficult to parse than usual.

But there are plenty of reviews talking about the game itself. Much of the more direct criticism suggests that the map is far too big for the 3v3 format, with the pace of play getting severely bogged down. Others seem to be finding the TTK out of balance, or the gunplay wonky. But, it's important to note, many of those reviews are coming with barely an hour played.

I've got no idea if Highguard is good or not – and as somebody who absolutely Does Not Get competitive shooters, I likely never will. And I've definitely played plenty of games that I quickly clocked as being terrible within minutes of putting my hands on them. But there's a certain glee around the takedown of Highguard that I find deeply off-putting, and I hope the game itself can somehow display its merits outside the cloud of discourse that's lingered over it since The Game Awards.

"I wish Highguard had been received better," CEO admits, after cancelling a planned Apex Legends-style shadow drop when Geoff Keighley said "let me do something."