Announced as The Game Awards’ ‘one last thing’, Highguard’s announcement came out of nowhere as gaming’s next big hero shooter. Built by former Titanfall and Apex Legends developers, the title has a huge pedigree of talent behind it, even if gamers are sceptical that there’s room for a new hero shooter in the current gaming landscape.

Concern for the title has only compounded after its development team went completely radio silent after announcing Highguard at The Game Awards. Not a peep has been heard since the announcement, indicating its devs might be hoping the game speaks for itself instead of marketing it heavily.

Nevertheless, Highguard is most certainly launching later today. Here’s exactly when you can jump into the game on PC, Xbox and PlayStation.

What time does Highguard release?

Highguard is set to launch at the global time of 6pm GMT. This is across PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.

As the release is happening at the same time across the world, there’s no way to jump into Highguard early. Some games allow you to set your console timezone to New Zealand to hop on a little early, but that isn’t the case with Highguard.

In this case, you’ll need to wait around until 6pm before Highguard becomes available.

Bear in mind that the servers may encounter some issues to start with, especially if you’re logging on as soon as the game launches. The sudden influx of players is likely to cause havoc with the game’s networking, so it might be worth scheduling a play session for later in the evening if you want everything to run smoothly.

Sadly, there’s no way to pre-load Highguard on any platform right now. That means you’ll only be able to start the download at 6pm and will be limited by both how fast your internet is and how well the store servers hold up.

Thankfully, the Highguard system requirements only list 25GB of space needed for it to be installed. That usually means the download size will come in just under that, so roughly 20GB of files should take around 15 minutes on average UK internet speeds.

Is Highguard free to play?

Another boon for Highguard is that it is completely free to play – at least on PC.

The game will be free to download on Xbox and PlayStation, but you’ll need an active subscription for the console’s online services to play due to its multiplayer nature.

Will you be hopping on to play Highguard tonight?